Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome

Fall 2020 -- Pomona College

Jody Valentine

Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome Copyright © by Jody Valentine. All Rights Reserved.

Contents

- Prologue

- Part I. Introduction to Gender & Sexuality in Ancient Rome: Part One

- 1. Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. “Is Female To Male as Nature Is To Culture?”

- 2. Butler, Judith. 1998. “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.”

- 3. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

- 4. hooks, bell. 1998. “Black Women and Feminism.”

- Part II. Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome: Part Two

- 5. Rome Timeline and Maps

- 6. “Early Rome to 500 B.C.E.”

- 7. “Early Roman Society, Religion, and Values”

- 8. Donna Zuckerberg’s editorial “Welcome to the New Eidolon” and LKM Maisal’s “Women are Made, But from What?”

- Part III. The Origins of Rome

- 9. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book I: Preface - 13

- 10. Vergil's Aeneid Book I

- 11. Aimee Hinds "Rape or Romance? Bad Feminism in Mythical Retellings"

- 12. OPTIONAL: Richlin, Amy. 1992: "Reading Ovid's Rapes"

- Part IV. Lucretia

- 13. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Volume I. 57 - 60 : Tarquinius and Lucretia

- 14. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, Book 4

- 15. Ovid, Fasti: LCL 253

- 16. Joshel, Sandra. 2002. “The Female Body and the Body Politic: Livy’s Lucretia and Verginia”

- 17. Joanna Kenty. 2017. “Avenging Lucretia”

- Part V. Queering Rome

- 18. Ovid: The Metamorphoses : Book IX: lines 666 - 797

- 19. Female Homoeroticism in the Roman Empire: How Many Licks Does It Take to Get to the Disruption of a Phallocentric Model of Sexuality? By Nicole Speth

- 20. “The Body in Question” by Grace Gillies (2019)

- 21. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

- Part VI. Race, Ethnicity, and Imperialism: Cleopatra

- 22. Egypt, 146–31 B.C.

- 23. Vergil's Aeneid Book VIII

- 24. Horace 1.37

- 25. Propertius 3.11

- 26. Haley, Shelley. 1993. “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-Membering, Re-Claiming, Re-Empowering.”

- 27. Stemma Cleopatra.pdf

- 28. End of the Republic :Chronological Table

- 29. White at the Museum

- 30. 'Race'-ing the Romans with Dr. Shelley Haley 10/19

- Part VII. Race, Gender, Ethnicity, & Cleopatra : Further Resources

- 31. Royster, Francesca T. 2003. Becoming Cleopatra : The Shifting Image of an Icon. New York : Palgrave Macmillan,.

- 32. Biddick, Kathleen, John R. Clarke, Stephen F. Eisenman, Ikem Stanley Okoye, and Frances K. Pohl. 1996. “Aesthetics, Ethnicity, and the History of Art.” The Art Bulletin 78 (4): 594–621

- 33. Be Not Afraid of the Dark by Shelley P. Haley

- 34. Kennedy, Rebecca. n.d. “Classics at the Intersections: Is There a ‘race’ or ‘Ethnicity’ in Greco-Roman Antiquity?” Classics at the Intersections (blog). Accessed June 16, 2020. https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2019/04/is-there-race-or-ethnicity-in-greco.html.

- 35. Blog: Women in Classics: A Conversation with SCS President-Elect Shelley Haley: Part I

- 36. Blog: Women in Classics: A Conversation with Shelley Haley: Part II

- 37. Rebecca Futo Kennedy: Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World

- Part VIII. Roman Satire, Contemporary Comedy, and Lesbian Content

- 38. Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette"

- 39. Hannah Gadsby "Douglas"

- Part IX. Student Projects

- 40. The Penis Poetry (Among Other Things)

- 41. Why Are We So Uncomfortable? The Confusing Taboo of Menstruation in Ancient Rome and Modern America

- 42. Rome and America, Rome(in) America, Roman America

- 43. Male Prostitution in Ancient Rome: The Tangled Narratives of Material Culture

- 44. Re-Imagining the Goddess

- 45. Reflections on Academia

- 46. Juvenal and Roman Heteronormativity

- 47. Interviewing a Human Who Carries Multifaceted Baggage from Their Perceived Identity: A Series of Intimate Moments with Elagabalus

- 48. For You

- 49. Constructing Queerness: Pederasty

- 50. Silly Queen! You know that doesn’t apply to him: The adventures of a woman in an unfair world

- 51. Finding the “Other” in Classics: Researching the Yoruba Society to Understand Erotic Magic and Ritual in Ancient Rome

- Part X. Workshops

- 52. Workshop 1

- 53. Workshop 2

- 54. Workshop 3

- 55. Workshop 4

- 56. Workshop 5

- Part XI. Resources (TBA)

- 57. Richlin, Amy. 2014. “The Ethnographer’s Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age.”

- Appendix

1

Prologue

With the help of Claremont Colleges librarian Jennifer Beamer, this Pressbook is being created by and for the faculty and students of the fall 2020 Pomona College seminar, Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome.

This semester, we will be creating our learning community beyond the pomerium of Pomona.  As we conduct our inquiry into case studies ranging from how gendered violence looms large in Rome’s origin story to the question of Cleopatra’s Blackness, we will be deliberately engaging with the past with an awareness of our circumstances (and who we are) in the present.

In this course, we will aim to bring both critical reflection and creative exuberance to our inquiry, acknowledging that our experiences this semester will be, in many ways, unlike anything before, or anything we imagined.   This book is being created with the intention of supporting our efforts to become a community of scholars separated physically, but connected by our shared interest and collective work.

Our course materials — images, maps, videos, ancient texts, theoretical essays, etc. — will be organized here.  This book will develop together with the course.  As we move into each of our thematic modules, our readings, images, and workshops will be added to this book, which can be read online, collaboratively annotated via hypothes.is, downloaded, and printed.

At the end of the semester, student essays will also be uploaded here.  All participants in this course will be able to keep — and share — the finalized form of this book.

—Jody Valentine

August 7, 2020

I

Introduction to Gender & Sexuality in Ancient Rome: Part One

FOR 9/1: Please read the following essays in the order listed here and remember to try out your new hypothes.is account in order to read and contribute (at least one comment per text) to our collective annotations.

1

Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. “Is Female To Male as Nature Is To Culture?”

[Formatted for Pressbooks by Jody Valentine and Jennifer Beamer.  Original page numbers are in parenthesis.  Footnotes have been converted to Endnotes and the bibliography, which appears the end of the original book, is appended here.]

Much of the creativity of anthropology derives from the tension between two sets of demands: that we explain human universals, and that we explain cultural particulars. By this canon, woman provides us with one of the more challenging problems to be dealt with. The secondary status of woman in society is one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact. Yet within that universal fact, the specific cultural conceptions and symbolizations of woman are extraordinarily diverse and even mutually contradictory. Further, the actual treatment of women and their relative power and contribution vary enormously from culture to culture, and over different periods in the history of particular cultural traditions. Both of these points – the universal fact and the cultural variation constitute problems to be explained.

My interest in the problem is of course more than academic: I wish to see genuine change come about, the emergence of a social and cultural order in which as much of the range of human potential is open to women as is open to men. The universality of female subordination, the fact that it exists within every type of social and economic arrangement and in societies of every degree of complexity, indicates to me that we are up against something very profound, very stubborn, something (68) we cannot rout out simply by rearranging a few tasks and roles in the social system, or even by reordering the whole economic structure. In this paper I try to expose the underlying logic of cultural thinking that assumes the inferiority of women; I try to show the highly persuasive nature of the logic, for if it were not so persuasive, people would not keep subscribing to it. But I also try to show the social and cultural sources of that logic, to indicate wherein lies the potential for change.

It is important to sort out the levels of the problem. The confusion can be staggering. For example, depending on which aspect of Chinese culture we look at, we might extrapolate any of several entirely different guesses concerning the status of women in China. In the ideology of Taoism, yin, the female principle, and yang, the male principle, are given equal weight; “the opposition, alternation, and interaction of these two forces give rise to all phenomena in the universe” (Siu, 1968: 2). Hence we might guess that maleness and femaleness are equally valued in the general ideology of Chinese culture. 1  Looking at the social structure, however, we see the strongly emphasized patrilineal descent principle, the importance of sons, and the absolute authority of the father in the family. Thus we might conclude that China is the archetypal patriarchal society.

Next, looking at the actual roles played, power and influence wielded, and material contributions made by women in Chinese society – all of which are, upon observation, quite substantial – we would have to say that women are allotted a great deal of (unspoken) status in the system. Or again, we might focus on the fact that a goddess, Kuan Yin, is the central (most worshiped, most depicted) deity in Chinese Buddhism, and we might be tempted to say, as many have tried to say about goddess-worshiping cultures in prehistoric and early historical societies, that China is actually a sort of matriarchy. In short, we must be absolutely clear about what we are trying to explain before explaining it.

We may differentiate three levels of the problem:

1. The universal fact of culturally attributed second-class status of woman in every society. Two questions are important here. First, what do we mean by this; what is our evidence that this is a universal fact? And second, how are we to explain this fact, once having established it?

2. Specific ideologies, symbolizations, and social-structural arrangements pertaining to women that vary widely from culture to culture. The problem at this level is to account for any particular cultural com- (69) plex in terms of factors specific to that group-the standard level of anthropological analysis.

3. Observable on-the-ground details of women’s activities, contributions, powers, influence, etc., often at variance with cultural ideology (although always constrained within the assumption that women may never be officially preeminent in the total system). This is the level of direct observation, often adopted now by feminist-oriented anthropologists.

This paper is primarily concerned with the first of these levels, the problem of the universal devaluation of women. The analysis thus depends not upon specific cultural data but rather upon an analysis of “culture” taken generically as a special sort of process in the world. A discussion of the second level, the problem of cross-cultural variation in conceptions and relative valuations of women, will entail a great deal of cross-cultural research and must be postponed to another time. As for the third level, it will be obvious from my approach that I would consider it a misguided endeavor to focus only upon women’s actual though culturally unrecognized and unvalued powers in any given society, without first understanding the overarching ideology and deeper assumptions of the culture that render such powers trivial.

The Universality of Female Subordination

What do I mean when I say that everywhere, in every known culture, women are considered in some degree inferior to men? First of all, I must stress that I am talking about cultural evaluations; I am saying that each culture, in its own way and on its own terms, makes this evaluation. But what would constitute evidence that a particular culture considers women inferior?

Three types of data would suffice: (1) elements of cultural ideology and informants’ statements that explicitly devalue women, according them, their roles, their tasks, their products, and their social milieux less prestige than are accorded men and the male correlates; (2) symbolic devices, such as the attribution of defilement, which may be interpreted as implicitly making a statement of inferior valuation; and (3) social-structural arrangements that exclude women from participation in or contact with some realm in which the highest powers of the society are felt to reside.2

These three types of data may all of course be interrelated ( 70) in any particular system, though they need not necessarily be. Further, anyone of them will usually be sufficient to make the point of female inferiority in a given culture. Certainly, female exclusion from the most sacred rite or the highest political council is sufficient evidence. Certainly, explicit cultural ideology devaluing women (and their tasks, roles, products, etc.) is sufficient evidence. Symbolic indicators such as defilement are usually sufficient, although in a few cases in which, say, men and women are equally polluting to one another, a further indicator is required – and is, as far as my investigations have ascertained, always available.

On any or all of these counts, then, I would flatly assert that we find women subordinated to men in every known society. The search for a genuinely egalitarian, let alone matriarchal, culture has proved fruitless. An example from one society that has traditionally been on the credit side of this ledger will suffice. Among the matrilineal Crow, as Lowie (1956) points out, “Women …. had highly honorific offices in the Sun Dance; they could become directors of the Tobacco Ceremony and played, if anything, a more conspicuous part in it than the men; they sometimes played the hostess in the Cooked Meat Festival; they were not debarred from sweating or doctoring or from seeking a vision” (p. 61). Nonetheless, “Women [during menstruation] formerly rode inferior horses and evidently this loomed as a source of contamination, for they were not allowed to approach either a wounded man or men starting on a war party. A taboo still lingers against their coming near sacred objects at these times” (p. 44). Further, just before enumerating women’s rights of participation in the various rituals noted above, Lowie mentions one particular Sun Dance Doll bundle that was not supposed to be unwrapped by a woman (p. 60). Pursuing this trail we find: “‘According to all Lodge Grass informants and most others, the doll owned by Wrinkled- face took precedence not only of other dolls but of all other Crow medicines whatsoever …. This particular doll was not supposed to be handled by a woman” (p. 229). 3

In sum, the Crow are probably a fairly typical case. Yes, women have certain powers and rights, in this case some that place them in fairly high positions. Yet ultimately the line is drawn: menstruation is a threat to warfare, one of the most valued institutions of the tribe, one that is central to their self-definition; and the most sacred object of the tribe is taboo to the direct sight and touch of women. (71)  Similar examples could be multiplied ad infinitum, but I think the onus is no longer upon us to demonstrate that female subordination is a cultural universal; it is up to those who would argue against the point to bring forth counterexamples. I shall take the universal secondary status of women as a given, and proceed from there.

Nature and Culture^4

How are we to explain the universal devaluation of women? We could of course rest the case on biological determinism. There is something genetically inherent in the male of the species, so the biological determinists would argue, that makes them the naturally dominant sex; that “something” is lacking in females, and as a result women are not only naturally subordinate but in general quite satisfied with their position, since it affords them protection and the opportunity to maximize maternal pleasures, which to them are the most satisfying experiences of life. Without going into a detailed refutation of this position, I think it fair to say that it has failed to be established to the satisfaction of almost anyone in academic anthropology. This is to say, not that biological facts are irrelevant, or that men and women are not different, but that these facts and differences only take on significance of superior/inferior within the framework of culturally defined value systems.

If we are unwilling to rest the case on genetic determinism, it seems to me that we have only one way to proceed. We must attempt to interpret female subordination in light of other universals, factors built into the structure of the most generalized situation in which all human beings, in whatever culture, find themselves. For example, every human being has a physical body and a sense of nonphysical mind, is part of a society of other individuals and an inheritor of a cultural tradition, and must engage in some relationship, however mediated, with “nature,” or the nonhuman realm, in order to survive. Every human being is born (to a mother) and ultimately dies, all are assumed to have an interest in personal survival, and society/culture has its own interest in (or at least momentum toward) continuity and survival, which transcends the lives and deaths of particular individuals. And so forth. It is in the realm of such universals of the human condition that we must seek an explanation for the universal fact of female devaluation.

I translate the problem, in other words, into the following simple question. What could there be in the generalized structure and conditions of existence, common to every culture, that would lead every culture to place a lower value upon women? Specifically, my thesis is that (72) woman is being identified with – or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of – something that every culture devalues, something that every culture defines as being of a lower order of existence than itself. Now it seems that there is only one thing that would fit that description, and that is “nature” in the most generalized sense. Every culture, or, generically, “culture,” is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interest. We may thus broadly equate culture with the notion of human consciousness, or with the products of human consciousness (i.e., systems of thought and technology), by means of which humanity attempts to assert control over nature.

Now the categories of “nature” and “culture” are of course conceptual categories – one can find no boundary out in the actual world between the two states or realms of being. And there is no question that some cultures articulate a much stronger opposition between the two categories than others – it has even been argued that primitive peoples (some or all) do not see or intuit any distinction between the human cultural state and the state of nature at all. Yet I would maintain that the universality of ritual betokens an assertion in all human cultures of the specifically human ability to act upon and regulate, rather than passively move with and be moved by, the givens of natural existence. In ritual, the purposive manipulation of given forms toward regulating and sustaining order, every culture asserts that proper relations between human existence and natural forces depend upon culture’s employing its special powers to regulate the overall processes of the world and life.

One realm of cultural thought in which these points are often articulated is that of concepts of purity and pollution. Virtually every culture has some such beliefs, which seem in large part (though not, of course, entirely) to be concerned with the relationship between culture and nature (see Ortner, 1978, n.d.). A well-known aspect of purity/pollution beliefs cross- culturally is that of the natural “contagion” of pollution; left to its own devices, pollution (for these purposes grossly equated with the unregulated operation of natural energies) spreads and overpowers all that it comes in contact with. Thus a puzzle – if pollution is so strong, how can anything be purified? Why is the purifying agent not itself polluted? The answer, in keeping with the present line of argument, is that purification is effected in a ritual context; purification ritual, as a purposive activity that pits self-conscious (symbolic) action against natural energies, is more powerful than those energies.

In any case, my point is simply that every culture implicitly recognizes (73) and asserts a distinction between the operation of nature and the operation of culture (human consciousness and its products); and further, that the distinctiveness of culture rests precisely on the fact that it can under most circumstances transcend natural conditions and turn them to its purposes. Thus culture (i.e. every culture) at some level of awareness asserts itself to be not only distinct from but superior to nature, and that sense of distinctiveness and superiority rests precisely on the ability to transform – to “socialize” and “culturalize” – nature.

Returning now to the issue of women, their pan-cultural second-class status could be accounted for, quite simply, by postulating that women are being identified or symbolically associated with nature, as opposed to men, who are identified with culture. Since it is always culture’s project to subsume and transcend nature, if women were considered part of nature, then culture would find it “natural” to subordinate, not to say oppress, them. Yet although this argument can be shown to have considerable force, it seems to oversimplify the case. The formulation I would like to defend and elaborate on in the following section, then, is that women are seen “merely” as being closer to nature than men. That is, culture (still equated relatively unambiguously with men) recognizes that women are active participants in its special processes, but at the same time sees them as being more rooted in, or having more direct affinity with, nature.

The revision may seem minor or even trivial, but I think it is a more accurate rendering of cultural assumptions. Further, the argument cast in these terms has several analytic advantages over the simpler formulation; I shall discuss these later. It might simply be stressed here that the revised argument would still account for the pan-cultural devaluation of women, for even if women are not equated with nature, they are nonetheless seen as representing a lower order of being, as being less transcendental of nature than men are. The next task of the paper, then, is to consider why they might be viewed in that way.

Why Is Woman Seen as Closer to Nature?

It all begins of course with the body and the natural procreative functions specific to women alone. We can sort out for discussion three levels at which this absolute physiological fact has significance: (1) woman’s body and its functions, more involved more of the time with “species life,” seem to place her closer to nature, in contrast to man’s physiology, which frees him more completely to take up the projects of culture; (2) woman’s body and its functions place her in social roles that in turn are considered to be at a lower order of the cultural process than man’s; (74) and (3) woman’s traditional social roles, imposed because of her body and its functions, in turn give her a different psychic structure, which, like her physiological nature and her social roles, is seen as being closer to nature. I shall discuss each of these points in turn, showing first how in each instance certain factors strongly tend to align woman with nature, then indicating other factors that demonstrate her full alignment with culture, the combined factors thus placing her in a problematic intermediate position. It will become clear in the course of the discussion why men seem by contrast less intermediate, more purely “cultural” than women. And I reiterate that I am dealing only at the level of cultural and human universals. These arguments are intended to apply to generalized humanity; they grow out of the human condition, as humanity has experienced and confronted it up to the present day.

I. Woman’s physiology seen as closer to nature.

This part of my argument has been anticipated, with subtlety, cogency, and a great deal of hard data, by de Beauvoir (1953). De Beauvoir reviews the physiological structure, development, and functions of the human female and concludes that “the female, to a greater extent than the male, is the prey of the species” (p. 60). She points out that many major areas and processes of the woman’s body serve no apparent function for the health and stability of the individual; on the contrary, as they perform their specific organic functions, they are often sources of discomfort, pain, and danger. The breasts are irrelevant to personal health; they may be excised at any time of a woman’s life. “Many of the ovarian secretions function for the benefit of the egg, promoting its maturation and adapting the uterus to its requirements; in respect to the organism as a whole, they make for disequilibrium rather than for regulation – the woman is adapted to the needs of the egg rather than to her own requirements” (p. 24). Menstruation is often uncomfortable, sometimes painful; it frequently has negative emotional correlates and in any case involves bothersome tasks of cleansing and waste disposal; and – a point that de Beauvoir does not mention – in many cultures it interrupts a woman’s routine, putting her in a stigmatized state involving various restrictions on her activities and social contacts. In pregnancy many of the woman’s vitamin and mineral resources are channeled into nourishing the fetus, depleting her own strength and energies. And finally, childbirth itself is painful and dangerous (pp. 24-27 passim). In sum, de Beauvoir concludes that the female “is more enslaved to the species than the male, her animality is more manifest” (p. 239).

While de Beauvoir’s book is ideological, her survey of woman’s physiological situation seems fair and accurate. It is simply a fact that pro- (75) portionately more of woman’s body space, for a greater percentage of her lifetime, and at some– sometimes great–cost to her personal health, strength, and general stability, is taken up with the natural processes surrounding the reproduction of the species.

De Beauvoir goes on to discuss the negative implications of woman’s “enslavement to the species” in relation to the projects in which humans engage, projects through which culture is generated and defined. She arrives thus at the crux of her argument (pp. 58-59):

Here we have the key to the whole mystery. On the biological level a species is maintained only by creating itself anew; but this creation results only in repeating the same Life in more individuals. But man assures the repetition of Life while transcending Life through Existence [i.e. goal-oriented, meaningful action]; by this transcendence he creates values that deprive pure repetition of all value. In the animal, the freedom and variety of male activities are vain because no project is involved. Except for his services to the species, what he does is immaterial. Whereas in serving the species, the human male also remodels the face of the earth, he creates new instruments, he invents, he shapes the future.

In other words, woman’s body seems to doom her to mere reproduction of life; the male, in contrast, lacking natural creative functions, must (or has the opportunity to) assert his creativity externally, “artificially,” through the medium of technology and symbols. In so doing, he creates relatively lasting, eternal, transcendent objects, while the woman creates only perishables – human beings.

This formulation opens up a number of important insights. It speaks, for example, to the great puzzle of why male activities involving the destruction of life (hunting and warfare) are often given more prestige than the female’s ability to give birth, to create life. Within de Beauvoir’s framework, we realize it is not the killing that is the relevant and valued aspect of hunting and warfare; rather, it is the transcendental (social, cultural) nature of these activities, as opposed to the naturalness of the process of birth: “For it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills” (ibid.).

Thus if male is, as I am suggesting, everywhere (unconsciously) associated with culture and female seems closer to nature, the rationale for these associations is not very difficult to grasp, merely from considering the implications of the physiological contrast between male and female. At the same time, however, woman cannot be consigned fully to the category of nature, for it is perfectly obvious that she is a full-fledged (76) human being endowed with human consciousness just as a man is; she is half of the human race, without whose cooperation the whole enterprise would collapse. She may seem more in the possession of nature than man, but having consciousness, she thinks and speaks; she generates, communicates, and manipulates symbols, categories, and values. She participates in human dialogues not only with other women but also with men. As Lévi-Strauss says, “Woman could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man’s world she is still a person, and since insofar as she is defined as a sign she must [still] be recognized as a generator of signs” (1969a: 496).

Indeed, the fact of woman’s full human consciousness, her full involvement in and commitment to culture’s project of transcendence over nature, may ironically explain another of the great puzzles of “the woman problem” – woman’s nearly universal unquestioning acceptance of her own devaluation. For it would seem that, as a conscious human and member of culture, she has followed out the logic of culture’s arguments and has reached culture’s conclusions along with the men. As de Beauvoir puts it (p. 59):

For she, too, is an existent, she feels the urge to surpass, and her project is not mere repetition but transcendence towards a different future – in her heart of hearts she finds confirmation of the masculine pretensions. She joins the men in the festivals that celebrate the successes and victories of the males. Her misfortune is to have been biologically destined for the repetition of Life, when even in her own view Life does not carry within itself its reasons for being, reasons that are more important than life itself.

In other words, woman’s consciousness – her membership, as it were, in culture – is evidenced in part by the very fact that she accepts her own devaluation and takes culture’s point of view.

I have tried here to show one part of the logic of that view, the part that grows directly from the physiological differences between men and women. Because of woman’s greater bodily involvement with the natural functions surrounding reproduction, she is seen as more a part of nature than man is. Yet in part because of her consciousness and participation in human social dialogue, she is recognized as a participant in culture. Thus she appears as something intermediate between culture and nature, lower on the scale of transcendence than man.

2. Woman’s social role seen as closer to nature.

Woman’s physiological functions, I have just argued, may tend in themselves to motivate^5 a view (77) of woman as closer to nature, a view she herself, as an observer of herself and the world, would tend to agree with. Woman creates naturally from within her own being, whereas man is free to, or forced to, create artificially, that is, through cultural means, and in such a way as to sustain culture. In addition, I now wish to show how woman’s physiological functions have tended universally to limit her social movement, and to confine her universally to certain social contexts which in turn are seen as closer to nature. That is, not only her bodily processes but the social situation in which her bodily processes locate her may carry this significance. And insofar as she is permanently associated (in the eyes of culture) with these social milieux, they add weight (perhaps the decisive part of the burden) to the view of woman as closer to nature. I refer here of course to woman’s confinement to the domestic family context, a confinement motivated, no doubt, by her lactation processes.

Woman’s body, like that of all female mammals, generates milk during and after pregnancy for the feeding of the newborn baby. The baby cannot survive without breast milk or some similar formula at this stage of life. Since the mother’s body goes through its lactation processes in direct relation to a pregnancy with a particular child, the relationship of nursing between mother and child is seen as a natural bond, other feeding arrangements being seen in most cases as unnatural and makeshift. Mothers and their children, according to cultural reasoning, belong together. Further, children beyond infancy are not strong enough to engage in major work, yet are mobile and unruly and not capable of understanding various dangers; they thus require supervision and constant care. Mother is the obvious person for this task, as an extension of her natural nursing bond with the children, or because she has a new infant and is already involved with child- oriented activities. Her own activities are thus circumscribed by the limitations and low levels of her children’s strengths and skills: 6 she is confined to the domestic family group; “woman’s place is in the home.”

Woman’s association with the domestic circle would contribute to the view of her as closer to nature in several ways. In the first place, the sheer fact of constant association with children plays a role in the issue; one can easily see how infants and children might themselves be considered part of nature. Infants are barely human and utterly unsocial- (78)ized; like animals they are unable to walk upright, they excrete without control, they do not speak. Even slightly older children are clearly not yet fully under the sway of culture. They do not yet understand social duties, responsibilities, and morals; their vocabulary and their range of learned skills are small. One finds implicit recognition of an association between children and nature in many cultural practices. For example, most cultures have initiation rites for adolescents (primarily for boys; I shall return to this point below), the point of which is to move the child ritually from a less than fully human state into full participation in society and culture; many cultures do not hold funeral rites for children who die at early ages, explicitly because they are not yet fully social beings. Thus children are likely to be categorized with nature, and woman’s close association with children may compound her potential for being seen as closer to nature herself. It is ironic that the rationale for boys’ initiation rites in many cultures is that the boys must be purged of the defilement accrued from being around mother and other women so much of the time, when in fact much of the woman’s defilement may derive from her being around children so much of the time.

The second major problematic implication of women’s close association with the domestic context derives from certain structural conflicts between the family and society at large in any social system. The implications of the “domestic/public opposition” in relation to the position of women have been cogently developed by Rosaldo (this volume), and I simply wish to show its relevance to the present argument. The notion that the domestic unit – the biological family charged with reproducing and socializing new members of the society – is opposed to the public entity – the superimposed network of alliances and relationships that is the society – is also the basis of Lévi-Strauss’s argument in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969a). Lévi-Strauss argues not only that this opposition is present in every social system, but further that it has the significance of the opposition between nature and culture. The universal incest prohibition 7 and its ally, the rule of exogamy (marriage outside the group), ensure that “the risk of seeing a biological family become established as a closed system is definitely eliminated; the biological group can no longer stand apart, and the bond of alliance with another family ensures the dominance of the social over the biological, and of the cultural over the natural” (p. 479). And although not every culture articulates a radical opposition between the domestic (79) and the public as such, it is hardly contestable that the domestic is always subsumed by the public; domestic units are allied with one another through the enactment of rules that are logically at a higher level than the units themselves; this creates an emergent unit – society – that is logically at a higher level than the domestic units of which it is composed.

Now, since women are associated with, and indeed are more or less confined to, the domestic context, they are identified with this lower order of social/cultural organization. What are the implications of this for the way they are viewed? First, if the specifically biological (reproductive) function of the family is stressed, as in Lévi-Strauss’s formulation, then the family (and hence woman) is identified with nature pure and simple, as opposed to culture. But this is obviously too simple; the point seems more adequately formulated as follows: the family (and hence woman) represents lower-level, socially fragmenting, particularistic sort of concerns, as opposed to interfamilial relations representing higher-level, integrative, universalistic sorts of concerns. Since men lack a “natural” basis (nursing, generalized to child care) for a familial orientation, their sphere of activity is defined at the level of interfamilial relations. And hence, so the cultural reasoning seems to go, men are the “natural” proprietors of religion, ritual, politics, and other realms of cultural thought and action in which universalistic statements of spiritual and social synthesis are made. Thus men are identified not only with culture, in the sense of all human creativity, as opposed to nature; they are identified in particular with culture in the old-fashioned sense of the finer and higher aspects of human thought – art, religion, law, etc.

Here again, the logic of cultural reasoning aligning woman with a lower order of culture than man is clear and, on the surface, quite compelling. At the same time, woman cannot be fully consigned to nature, for there are aspects of her situation, even within the domestic context, that undeniably demonstrate her participation in the cultural process. It goes without saying, of course, that except for nursing newborn infants (and artificial nursing devices can cut even this biological tie), there is no reason why it has to be mother – as opposed to father, or anyone else – who remains identified with child care. But even assuming that other practical and emotional reasons conspire to keep woman in this sphere, it is possible to show that her activities in the domestic context could as logically put her squarely in the category of culture.

In the first place, one must point out that woman not only feeds and cleans up after children in a simple caretaker operation; she in fact is the primary agent of their early socialization. It is she who transforms (80) newborn infants from mere organisms into cultured humans, teaching them manners and the proper ways to behave in order to become full-fledged members of the culture. On the basis of her socializing functions alone, she could not be more a representative of culture. Yet in virtually every society there is a point at which the socialization of boys is transferred to the hands of men. The boys are considered, in one set of terms or another, not yet “really” socialized; their entree into the realm of fully human (social, cultural) status can be accomplished only by men. We still see this in our own schools, where there is a gradual inversion in the proportion of female to male teachers up through the grades: most kindergarten teachers are female; most university professors^8 are male.

Or again, take cooking. In the overwhelming majority of societies cooking is the woman’s work. No doubt this stems from practical considerations – since the woman has to stay home with the baby, it is convenient for her to perform the chores centered in the home. But if it is true, as Lévi- Strauss has argued (1969b), that transforming the raw into the cooked may represent, in many systems of thought, the transition from nature to culture, then here we have woman aligned with this important culturalizing process, which could easily place her in the category of culture, triumphing over nature. Yet it is also interesting to note that when a culture (e.g. France or China) develops a tradition of haute cuisine – “real” cooking, as opposed to trivial ordinary domestic cooking – the high chefs are almost always men. Thus the pattern replicates that in the area of socialization – women perform lower-level conversions from nature to culture, but when the culture distinguishes a higher level of the same functions, the higher level is restricted to men.

In short, we see once again some sources of woman’s appearing more intermediate than man with respect to the nature/culture dichotomy. Her “natural” association with the domestic context (motivated by her natural lactation functions) tends to compound her potential for being viewed as closer to nature, because of the animal-like nature of children, and because of the infrasocial connotation of the domestic group as against the rest of society. Yet at the same time her socializing and cooking functions within the domestic context show her to be a powerful agent of the cultural process, constantly transforming raw natural resources into cultural products. Belonging to culture, yet appearing to have stronger and more direct connections with nature, she is once again seen as situated between the two realms. (81)

3. Woman’s psyche seen as closer to nature.

The suggestion that woman has not only a different body and a different social locus from man but also a different psychic structure is most controversial. I will argue that she probably does have a different psychic structure, but I will draw heavily on Chodorow’s paper (this volume) to establish first that her psychic structure need not be assumed to be innate; it can be accounted for, as Chodorow convincingly shows, by the facts of the probably universal female socialization experience. Nonetheless, if we grant the empirical near universality of a “feminine psyche” with certain specific characteristics, these characteristics would add weight to the cultural view of woman as closer to nature.

It is important to specify what we see as the dominant and universal aspects of the feminine psyche. If we postulate emotionality or irrationality, we are confronted with those traditions in various parts of the world in which women functionally are, and are seen as, more practical, pragmatic, and this-worldly than men. One relevant dimension that does seem pan-culturally applicable is that of relative concreteness vs. relative abstractness: the feminine personality tends to be involved with concrete feelings, things, and people, rather than with abstract entities; it tends toward personalism and particularism. A second, closely related, dimension seems to be that of relative subjectivity vs. relative objectivity: Chodorow cites Carlson’s study (1971), which concludes that “males represent experiences of self, others, space, and time in individualistic, objective, and distant ways, while females represent experiences in relatively interpersonal, subjective, immediate ways” (this volume, p. 56, quoting Carlson, p. 270). Although this and other studies were done in Western societies, Chodorow sees their findings on the differences between male and female personality – roughly, that men are more objective and inclined to relate in terms of relatively abstract categories, women more subjective and inclined to relate in terms of relatively concrete phenomena – as “general and nearly universal differences” (p. 48).

But the thrust of Chodorow’s elegantly argued paper is that these differences are not innate or genetically programmed; they arise from nearly universal features of family structure, namely that “women, universally, are largely responsible for early child care and for (at least) later female socialization” (p. 48) and that “the structural situation of child rearing, reinforced by female and male role training, produces these differences, which are replicated and reproduced in the sexual sociology of adult life” (p. 44). Chodorow argues that, because mother is the early socializer of both boys and girls, both develop “personal identification” with her, i.e. diffuse identification with her general per- (82) sonality, behavior traits, values, and attitudes (p. 51). A son, however, must ultimately shift to a masculine role identity, which involves building an identification with the father. Since father is almost always more remote than mother (he is rarely involved in child care, and perhaps works away from home much of the day), building an identification with father involves a “positional identification,” i.e. identification with father’s male role as a collection of abstract elements, rather than a personal identification with father as a real individual (p. 49). Further, as the boy enters the larger social world, he finds it in fact organized around more abstract and universalistic criteria (see Rosaldo, this volume, pp. 28-29; Chodorow, p. 58), as I have indicated in the previous section; thus his earlier socialization prepares him for, and is reinforced by, the type of adult social experience he will have.

For a young girl, in contrast, the personal identification with mother, which was created in early infancy, can persist into the process of learning female role identity. Because mother is immediate and present when the daughter is learning role identity, learning to be a woman involves the continuity and development of a girl’s relationship to her mother, and sustains the identification with her as an individual; it does not involve the learning of externally defined role characteristics (Chodorow, p. 51). This pattern prepares the girl for, and is fully reinforced by, her social situation in later life; she will become involved in the world of women, which is characterized by few formal role differences (Rosaldo, p. 29), and which involves again, in motherhood, “personal identification” with her children. And so the cycle begins anew.

Chodorow demonstrates to my satisfaction at least that the feminine personality, characterized by personalism and particularism, can be explained as having been generated by social-structural arrangements rather than by innate biological factors. The point need not be belabored further. But insofar as the “feminine personality” has been a nearly universal fact, it can be argued that its characteristics may have contributed further to the view of women as being somehow less cultural than men. That is, women would tend to enter into relationships with the world that culture might see as being more “like nature” – immanent and embedded in things as given – than “like culture” – transcending and transforming things through the superimposition of abstract categories and transpersonal values. Woman’s relationships tend to be, like nature, relatively unmediated, more direct, whereas man not only tends to relate in a more mediated way, but in fact ultimately often relates more consistently and strongly to the mediating categories and forms than to the persons or objects themselves.

It is thus not difficult to see how the feminine personality would lend (830weight to a view of women as being “closer to nature.” Yet at the same time, the modes of relating characteristic of women undeniably playa powerful  and important role in the cultural process. For just as relatively unmediated relating is in some sense at the lower end of the spectrum of human spiritual functions, embedded and particularizing rather than transcending and synthesizing, yet that mode of relating also stands at the upper end of that spectrum. Consider the mother-child relationship. Mothers tend to be committed to their children as individuals, regardless of sex, age, beauty, clan affiliation, or other categories in which the child might participate. Now any relationship with this quality – not just mother and child but any sort of highly personal, relatively unmediated commitment – may be seen as a challenge to culture and society “from below,” insofar as it represents the fragmentary potential of individual loyalties vis- a-vis the solidarity of the group. But it may also be seen as embodying the synthesizing agent for culture and society “from above,” in that it represents generalized human values above and beyond loyalties to particular social categories. Every society must have social categories that transcend personal loyalties, but every society must also generate a sense of ultimate moral unity for all its members above and beyond those social categories. Thus that psychic mode seemingly typical of women, which tends to disregard categories and to seek “communion” (Chodorow, p. 55, following Bakan, 1966) directly and personally with others, although it may appear infracultural from one point of view, is at the same time associated with the highest levels of the cultural process.

The Implications of Intermediacy

My primary purpose in this paper has been to attempt to explain the universal secondary status of women. Intellectually and personally, I felt strongly challenged by this problem; I felt compelled to deal with it before undertaking an analysis of woman’s position in any particular society. Local variables of economy, ecology, history, political and social structure, values, and world view- these could explain variations within this universal, but they could not explain the universal itself. And if we were not to accept the ideology of biological determinism, then explanation, it seemed to me, could only proceed by reference to other universals of the human cultural situation. Thus the general outlines. of the approach-although not of course the particular solution offered -were determined by the problem itself, and not by any predilection on my part for global abstract structural analysis.

I argued that the universal devaluation of women could be explained by postulating that women are seen as closer to nature than men, men (84) being seen as more unequivocally occupying the high ground of culture. The culture/nature distinction is itself a product of culture, culture being minimally defined as the transcendence, by means of systems of thought and technology, of the natural givens of existence. This of course is an analytic definition, but I argued that at some level every culture incorporates this notion in one form or other, if only through the performance of ritual as an assertion of the human ability to manipulate those givens. In any case, the core of the paper was concerned with showing why women might tend to be assumed, over and over, in the most diverse sorts of world views and in cultures of every degree of complexity, to be closer to nature than men. Woman’s physiology, more involved more of the time with “species of life”; woman’s association with the structurally subordinate domestic context, charged with the crucial function of transforming animal-like infants into cultured beings; “woman’s psyche,” appropriately molded to mothering functions by her own socialization and tending toward greater personalism and less mediated modes of relating – all these factors make woman appear to be rooted more directly and deeply in nature. At the same time, however, her “membership” and fully necessary participation in culture are recognized by culture and cannot be denied. Thus she is seen to occupy an intermediate position between culture and nature.

This intermediacy has several implications for analysis, depending upon how it is interpreted. First, of course, it answers my primary question of why woman is everywhere seen as lower than man, for even if she is not seen as nature pure and simple, she is still seen as achieving less transcendence of nature than man. Here intermediate simply means “middle status” on a hierarchy of being from culture to nature.

Second, intermediate may have the significance of “mediating,” i.e. performing some sort of synthesizing or converting function between nature and culture, here seen (by culture) not as two ends of a continuum but as two radically different sorts of processes in the world. The domestic unit – and hence woman, who in virtually every case appears as its primary representative – is one of culture’s crucial agencies for the conversion of nature into culture, especially with reference to the socialization of children. Any culture’s continued viability depends upon properly socialized individuals who will see the world in that culture’s terms and adhere more or less unquestioningly to its moral precepts. The functions of the domestic unit must be closely controlled in order to ensure this outcome; the stability of the domestic unit as an institution must be placed as far as possible beyond question. (We see some aspects of the protection of the integrity and stability of the (85) domestic group in the powerful taboos against incest, matricide, patricide, and fratricide.9) Insofar as woman is universally the primary agent of early socialization and is seen as virtually the embodiment of the functions of the domestic group, she will tend to come under the heavier restrictions and circumscriptions surrounding that unit. Her (culturally defined) intermediate position between nature and culture, here having the significance of her mediation (i.e. performing conversion functions) between nature and culture, would thus account not only for her lower status but for the greater restrictions placed upon her activities. In virtually every culture her permissible sexual activities are more closely circumscribed than man’s, she is offered a much smaller range of role choices, and she is afforded direct access to a far more limited range of its social institutions. Further, she is almost universally socialized to have a narrower and generally more conservative set of attitudes and views than man, and the limited social contexts of her adult life reinforce this situation. This socially engendered conservatism and traditionalism of woman’s thinking is another – perhaps the worst, certainly the most insidious – mode of social restriction, and would clearly be related to her traditional function of producing well-socialized members of the group.

Finally, woman’s intermediate position may have the implication of greater symbolic ambiguity (see also Rosaldo, this volume). Shifting our image of the culture/nature relationship once again, we may envision culture in this case as a small clearing within the forest of the larger natural system. From this point of view, that which is intermediate between culture and nature is located on the continuous periphery of culture’s clearing; and though it may thus appear to stand both above and below (and beside) culture, it is simply outside and around it. We can begin to understand then how a single system of cultural thought can often assign to woman completely polarized and apparently contradictory meanings, since extremes, as we say, meet. That she often represents both life and death is only the simplest example one could mention.

For another perspective on the same point, it will be recalled that the psychic mode associated with women seems to stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating. The tendency in that mode is to get involved more directly with people as individuals . and not as representatives of one social category or another; this mode can be seen as either “ignoring” (and thus subverting) or “transcending” (86) (and thus achieving a higher synthesis of) those social categories, depending upon the cultural view for any given purpose. Thus we can account easily for both the subversive feminine symbols (witches, evil eye, menstrual pollution, castrating mothers) and the feminine symbols of transcendence (mother goddesses, merciful dispensers of salvation, female symbols of justice, and the strong presence of feminine symbolism in the realms of art, religion, ritual, and law). Feminine symbolism, far more often than masculine symbolism, manifests this propensity toward polarized ambiguity– sometimes utterly exalted, sometimes utterly debased, rarely within the normal range of human possibilities.

If woman’s (culturally viewed) intermediacy between culture and nature has this implication of generalized ambiguity of meaning characteristic of marginal phenomena, then we are also in a better position to account for those cultural and historical “inversions” in which women are in some way or other symbolically aligned with culture and men with nature. A number of cases come to mind: the Siriono of Brazil, among whom, according to Ingham (1971: 1098),, “nature, the raw, and maleness” are opposed to “culture, the cooked, and femaleness”10; Nazi Germany, in which women were said to be the guardians of culture and morals; European courtly love, in which man considered himself the beast and woman the pristine exalted object – a pattern of thinking that persists, for example, among modern Spanish peasants (see Pitt-Rivers, 1961; Rosaldo, this volume). And there are no doubt other cases of this sort, including some aspects of our own culture’s view of women. Each such instance of an alignment of women with culture rather than nature requires detailed analysis of specific historical and ethnographic data. But in indicating how nature in general, and the feminine mode of interpersonal relations in particular, can appear from certain points of view to stand both under and over (but really simply outside of) the sphere of culture’s hegemony, we have at least laid the groundwork for such analyses.

In short, the postulate that woman is viewed as closer to nature than man has several implications for further analysis, and can be interpreted in several different ways. If it is viewed simply as a middle position on a scale from culture down to nature, then it is still seen as lower than culture and thus accounts for the pan-cultural assumption that woman is lower than man in the order of things. If it is read as a mediating (87) element in the culture-nature relationship, then it may account in part for the cultural tendency not merely to devalue woman but to circumscribe and restrict her functions, since culture must maintain control over its (pragmatic and symbolic) mechanisms for the conversion of nature into culture. And if it is read as an ambiguous status between culture and nature, it may help account for the fact that, in specific cultural ideologies and symbolizations, woman can occasionally be aligned with culture, and in any event is often assigned polarized and contradictory meanings within a single symbolic system. Middle status, mediating functions, ambiguous meaning-all are different readings, for different contextual purposes, of woman’s being seen as intermediate between nature and culture.

Conclusions

Ultimately, it must be stressed again that the whole scheme is a construct of culture rather than a fact of nature. Woman is not “in reality” any closer to (or further from) nature than man – both have consciousness, both are mortal. But there are certainly reasons why she appears that way, which is what I have tried to show in this paper. The result is a (sadly) efficient feedback system: various aspects of woman’s situation (physical, social, psychological) contribute to her being seen as closer to nature, while the view of her as closer to nature is in turn embodied in institutional forms that reproduce her situation. The implications for social change are similarly circular: a different cultural view can only grow out of a different social actuality; a different social actuality can only grow out of a different cultural view.

It is clear, then, that the situation must be attacked from both sides. Efforts directed solely at changing the social institutions – through setting quotas on hiring, for example, or through passing equal-pay-for-equal-work laws – cannot have far-reaching effects if cultural language and imagery continue to purvey a relatively devalued view of women. But at the same time efforts directed solely at changing cultural assumptions – through male and female consciousness-raising groups, for example, or through revision of educational materials and mass-media imagery – cannot be successful unless the institutional base of the society is changed to support and reinforce the changed cultural view. Ultimately, both men and women can and must be equally involved in projects of creativity and transcendence. Only then will women be seen as aligned with culture, in culture’s ongoing dialectic with nature.

Footnotes

1. It is true of course that yin, the female principle, has a negative valence. Nonetheless, there is an absolute complementarity of yin and yang in Taoism, a recognition that the world requires the equal operation and interaction of both principles for its survival.

2. Some anthropologists might consider this type of evidence (social-structural arrangements that exclude women, explicitly or de facto, from certain groups, roles, or statuses) to be a subtype of the second type of evidence (symbolic formulations of inferiority). I would not disagree with this view, although most social anthropologists would probably separate the two types.

3. While we are on the subject of injustices of various kinds, we might note that Lowie secretly bought this doll, the most sacred object in the tribal repertoire, from its custodian, the widow of Wrinkled-face. She asked $400 for it, but this price was “far beyond [Lowie’s] means,” and he finally got it for $80 (p. 300).

4. With all due respect to Lévi-Strauss (1969a, b, and passim).

5. Semantic theory uses the concept of motivation of meaning, which encompasses various ways in which a meaning may be assigned to a symbol because of certain objective properties of that symbol, rather than by arbitrary association. In a sense, this entire paper is an inquiry into the motivation of the meaning of woman as a symbol, asking why woman may be unconsciously assigned the significance of being closer to nature. For a concise statement on the various types of motivation of meaning, see Ullman (1963).

6. A situation that often serves to make her more childlike herself.

7. David M. Schneider (personal communication) is prepared to argue that the incest taboo is not universal, on the basis of material from Oceania. Let us say at this point, then, that it is virtually universal.

8.  I remember having my first male teacher in the fifth grade, and I remember being excited about that – it was somehow more grown-up.

9. Nobody seems to care much about sororicide – a point that ought to be investigated.

10. Ingham’s discussion is rather ambiguous itself, since women are also associated with animals: “The contrasts man/animal and man/woman are evidently similar … hunting is the means of acquiring women as well as animals” (p. 1095). A careful reading of the data suggests that both women and animals are mediators between nature and culture in this tradition.

Bibliography

Bakan, David. 1966. The Duality of Human Existence. Boston.

Carlson, Rae. 1971. “Sex Differences in Ego Functioning: Exploratory Studies of Agency and Communion,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 37: 267-77.

De Beauvoir, Simone. 1953. The Second Sex. New York. Originally published in French in 1949.

Ingham, John M. 1971. “Are the Sirion6 Raw or Cooked?” American Anthropologist, 73: 1092-99.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1969a. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. J. H. Bell and J. R. von Stunner; ed. R. Needham. Boston.

1969b. The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. J. and D. Weightman. New York.

Lowie, Robert. 1956. The Crow Indians. New York. Originally published in 1935.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1973. “Sherpa Purity,” American Anthropologist, 75: 49-63.

——– n.d. “Purification Beliefs and Practices,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, forthcoming.

Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1961. People of the Sierra. Chicago.

Siu, R. G. H. 1968. The Man of Many Qualities. Cambridge.

Ullman, Stephen. 1963. “Semantic Universals,” in Joseph H. Greenberg, ed., Universals of Language. Cambridge.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. Is female to male as nature is to culture? In M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, culture, and society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 68-87.

2

Butler, Judith. 1998. “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.”

One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Strictly speaking, ‘women’ cannot be said to exist.

— Julia Kristeva

Woman does not have a sex.

— Luce Irigaray

The deployment of sexuality.. . established this notion of sex.

— Michel Foucault

The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual.

— Monique Wittig

[T]here is the political problem that feminism encounters in the assumption that the term women denotes a common identity. Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety. As Denise Riley’s title suggests, Am I That Name? is a question produced by the very possibility of the name’s multiple significations. [1] If one ‘is’ a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered ‘person’ transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out ‘gender’ from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.

The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist crossculturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination. The notion of a universal patriarchy has been widely criticized in recent years for its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists. Where those various contexts have been consulted within such theories, it has been to find ‘examples’ or ‘illustrations’ of a universal principle that is assumed from the start. That form of feminist theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly (278) Western notions of oppression, but because they tend as well to construct a ‘Third World’ or even an ‘Orient’ in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, non-Western barbarism. The urgency of feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism’s own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a categorical or fictive universality of the structure of domination, held to produce women’s common subjugated experience.

Although the claim of universal patriarchy no longer enjoys the kind of credibility it once did, the notion of a generally shared conception of ‘women’, the corollary to that framework, has been much more difficult to displace. Certainly, there have been plenty of debates: Is there some commonality among ‘women’ that preexists their oppression, or do ‘women’ have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone? Is there a specificity to women’s cultures that is independent of their subordination by hegemonic, masculinist cultures? Are the specificity and integrity of women’s cultural or linguistic practices always specified against and, hence, within the terms of some more dominant cultural formation? If there is a region of the ‘specifically feminine’, one that is both differentiated from the masculine as such and recognizable in its difference by an unmarked and, hence, presumed universality of ‘women’? The masculine/feminine binary constitutes not only the exclusive framework in which that specificity can be recognized, but in every other way the ‘specificity’ of the feminine is once again fully decontextualized and separated off analytically and politically from the constitution of class, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power relations that both constitute ‘identity’ and make the singular notion of identity a misnomer. [2] [. . .]

Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations? And is not such a reification precisely contrary to feminist aims? To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix? If a stable notion of gender no longer proves to be the foundational premise of feminist politics, perhaps a new sort of feminist politics is now desirable to contest the very reifications of gender and identity, one that will take the variable construction of identity as both a methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political goal.

To trace the political operations that produce and conceal what qualifies as the juridical subject of feminism is precisely the task of a feminist genealogy of the category of women. [. . .]

Although the unproblematic unity of ‘women’ is often invoked to construct a solidarity of identity, a split is introduced in the feminist subject by the distinction between sex and gender. Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny, the distinction between sex and gender serves the (279) argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. The unity of the subject is thus already potentially contested by the distinction that permits of gender as a multiple interpretation of sex.

If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders.  Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of ‘men’ will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that ‘women’ will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two.[3] The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.

This radical splitting of the gendered subject poses yet another set of problems. Can we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is ‘sex’ anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess thescientific discourses which purport to establish such facts for us? Does sex have a history?[4] Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.[5]

It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. [. . .] (280)

Is there ‘a’ gender which persons are said to have, or is it an essential attribute that a person is said to be, as implied in the question ‘What gender are you?’ When feminist theorists claim that gender is the cultural interpretation of sex or that gender is culturally constructed, what is the manner or mechanism of this construction? If gender is constructed, could it be constructed differently, or does its constructedness imply some form of social determinism, foreclosing the possibility of agency and transformation? Does ‘construction’ suggest that certain laws generate gender differences along universal axes of sexual difference? How and where does the construction of gender take place? What sense can we make of a construction that cannot assume a human constructor prior to that construction? On some accounts, the notion that gender is constructed suggests a certain determinism of gender meanings inscribed on anatomically differentiated bodies, where those bodies are understood as passive recipients of an inexorable cultural law. When the relevant ‘culture’ that ‘constructs’ gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny.

On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex that ‘one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one’.[6] For Beauvoir, gender is ‘constructed’, but implied in her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender. Is gender as variable and volitional as Beauvoir’s account seems to suggest? Can ‘construction’ in such a case be reduced to a form of choice? Beauvoir is clear that one ‘becomes’ a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one. And clearly, the compulsion does not come from ‘sex’. There is nothing in her account that guarantees that the ‘one’ who becomes a woman is necessarily female. If ‘the body is a situation’,[7] as she claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.[8]

The controversy over the meaning of construction appears to founder on the conventional philosophical polarity between free will and determinism. As a consequence, one might reasonably suspect that some common linguistic restriction on thought both forms and limits the terms of the debate. Within those terms, ‘the body’ appears as a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as the instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning for itself. In either case, the body is figured as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural meanings are only externally related. But ‘the body’ it itself a construction, as are the myriad ‘bodies’ that constitute the domain of gendered subjects. Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of (281) their gender; the question then emerges: To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly immaterial will?

Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse which, it will be suggested, seeks to set certain limits to analysis or to safeguard certain tenets of humanism as presuppositional to any analysis of gender. The locus of intractability, whether in ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ or in the very meaning of ‘construction’, provides a due to what cultural possibilities can and cannot become mobilized through any further analysis. The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender configurations within culture. This is not to say that any and all gendered possibilities are open, but that the boundaries of analysis suggest the limits of a discursively conditioned experience. These limits are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of universal rationality. Constraint is thus built into what that language constitutes as the imaginable domain of gender. […]

What can be meant by ‘identity’, then, and what grounds the presumption that identities are self-identical, persisting through time as the same, unified and internally coherent? More importantly, how do these assumptions inform the discourses on ‘gender identity’? It would be wrong to think that the discussion of ‘identity’ ought to proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason that ‘persons’ only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility. Sociological discussions have conventionally sought to understand the notion of the person in terms of an agency that claims ontological priority to the various roles and functions through which it assumes social visibility and meaning.

Within philosophical discourse itself, the notion of ‘the person’ has received analytic elaboration on the assumption that whatever social context the person is ‘in’ remains somehow externally related to the definitional structure of personhood, be that consciousness, the capacity for language, or moral deliberation. Although that literature is not examined here, one premise of such inquiries is the focus of critical exploration and inversion. Whereas the question of what constitutes ‘personal identity’ within philosophical accounts almost always centers on the question of what internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time, the question here will be: To whatextent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the selfidentical status of theperson? To what extent is ‘identity’ a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gender also (282) govern culturally intelligible notions of identity? In other words, the ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility. Inasmuch as ‘identity’ is assured through the stabilizing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined.

‘Intelligible’ genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire. In other words, the spectres of discontinuity and incoherence, themselves thinkable only in relation to existing norms of continuity and coherence, are constantly prohibited and produced by the very laws that seek to establish causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the ‘expression’ or ‘effect’ of both in the manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice.

The notion that there might be a ‘truth’ of sex, as Foucault ironically terms it, is produced precisely through the regulatory practices that generate coherent identities through the matrix of coherent gender norms. The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, where these are understood as expressive attributes of ‘male’ and ‘female’. The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of ‘identities’ cannot ‘exist’—that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not ‘follow’ from either sex or gender. ‘Follow’ in this context is a political relation of entailment instituted by the cultural laws that establish and regulate the shape and meaning of sexuality. Indeed, precisely because certain kinds of ‘gender identities’ fail to conform to those norms of cultural intelligibility, they appear only as developmental failures or logical impossibilities from within that domain. Their persistence and proliferation, however, provide critical opportunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of that domain of intelligibility and, hence, to open up within the very terms of that matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender disorder.

Before such disordering practices are considered, however, it seems crucial to understand the ‘matrix of intelligibility’. Is it singular? Of what is it composed? What is the peculiar alliance presumed to exist between a system of compulsory heterosexuality and the discursive categories that establish the identity concepts of sex? If ‘identity’ is an effect of discursive practices, to what extent is gender identity, construed as a relationship among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire, the effect of a regulatory practice that can be identified as compulsory heterosexuality? Would that explanation return us to yet another totalizing frame in which compulsory heterosexuality merely (283) takes the place of phallogocentrism as the monolithic cause of gender oppression? [. . .]

The articulation ‘I feel like a woman’ by a female or ‘I feel like a man’ by a male presupposes that in neither case is the claim meaninglessly redundant. Although it might appear unproblematic to be a given anatomy (although we shall later consider the way in which that project is also fraught with difficulty), the experience of a gendered psychic disposition or cultural identity is considered an achievement. Thus, ‘I feel like a woman’ is true to the extent that Aretha Franklin’s invocation of the defining Other is assumed: ‘You make me feel like a natural woman.’ This achievement requires a differentiation from the opposite gender. Hence, one is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair.

Gender can denote a unity of experience, of sex, gender, and desire, only when sex can be understood in some sense to necessitate gender—where gender is a psychic and/or cultural designation of the self and desire—where desire is heterosexual and therefore differentiates itself through an oppositional relation to that other gender it desires. The internal coherence or unity of either gender, man or woman, thereby requires both a stable and oppositional heterosexuality. That institutional heterosexuality both requires and produces the univocity of each of the gendered terms that constitute the limit of gendered possibilities within an oppositional, binary gender system. This conception of gender presupposes not only a causal relation among sex, gender, and desire, but suggests as well that desire reflects or expresses gender and that gender reflects or expresses desire. The metaphysical unity of the three is assumed to be truly known and expressed in a differentiating desire for an oppositional gender—that is, in a form of oppositional heterosexuality. Whether as a naturalistic paradigm which establishes a causal continuity among sex, gender, and desire, or as an authentic-expressive paradigm in which some true self is said to be revealed simultaneously or successively in sex, gender, and desire, here ‘the old dream of symmetry’, as Irigaray has called it, is presupposed, reified, and rationalized.

This rough sketch of gender gives us a clue to understanding the political reasons for the substantializing view of gender. The institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire. The act of differentiating the two oppositional moments of the binary results in a consolidation of each term, the respective internal coherence of sex, gender, and desire. [. . .]

If it is possible to speak of a ‘man’ with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a ‘man’ with a feminine attribute, whatever that (284) is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility.

The appearance of an abiding substance or gendered self, what the psychiatrist Robert Stoller refers to as a ‘gender core’,[9] is thus produced by the regulation of attributes along culturally established lines of coherence. As a result, the exposure of this fictive production is conditioned by the deregulated play of attributes that resist assimilation into the ready made framework of primary nous and subordinate adjectives. It is of course always possible to argue that dissonant adjectives work retroactively to redefine the substantive identities they are said to modify and, hence, to expand the substantive categories of gender to include possibilities that they previously excluded. But if these substances are nothing other than the coherences contingently created through the regulation of attributes, it would seem that the ontology of substances itself is not only an artificial effect, but essentially superfluous.

In this sense, gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed. The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘there is no ”being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything’.[10] In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results. (285)

Citation: Butler, Judith. 1998. “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.” In Feminisms, edited by Sandra. Kemp and Judith. Squires, 278–85. New York: Oxford University Press.

This text was formatted for Pressbooks by Jennifer Beamer and Jody Valentine, from the Feminisms volume, whose editors culled the excerpt from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).  The page numbers (included here in parenthesis) are from the Feminisms volume.

1. See Denise Riley, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of `Women’ in History (New York: Macmillan, 1988). ↵

2. See Sandra Harding, ‘The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory’, in Sandra Harding and Jean E O’Barr (eds.), Sex and Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). ↵

3. For an interesting study of the berdache and multiplegender arrangements in Native American cultures, see Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). See also, Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds.), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construct of Sexuality (New York Cambridge University Press, 1981). For a politically sensitive and provocative analysis of the berdache, transsexuals, and the contingency of gender dichotomies, see Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). ↵

4. Clearly Foucault’s History of Sexuality offers one way to rethink the history of ‘sex’ within a given modern Eurocentric context. For a more detailed consideration, see Thomas Lacquer and Catherine Gallagher (eds.), The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), originally published as an issue of Representations, 14 (Spring 1986). ↵

5. See my ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault’, in Seyla Benhabib and Drusilla Cornell (eds.), Feminism as Critique (Basil Blackwell, dist. by University of Minnesota Press, 1987). ↵

6. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. E. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1973), 301. ↵

7. Ibid. 38. ↵

8. See my ‘Sex and Gender in Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, Yale French Studies, Simone de Beauvoit: Witness to a Century, 72 (Winter, 1986). ↵

9. Robert Stoller, Presentations of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 1114. ↵

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 45. ↵

3

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

Preface:

In the 1970s, women of color and lesbians in the United States called on feminist scholars to recognize their own discriminatory practices and to analyze the intersections of racial, sexual, and gender hierarchies. At an academic feminist conference commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the lesbian poet and literature professor Audre Lorde articulated the frustrations of women treated as tokens, the sole black or lesbian speaker invited to participate in a predominantly white movement. Her influential remarks impelled women’s studies courses, programs, and conferences to expand their vision and embrace, rather than fear, differences among women. Lorde knew firsthand the dilemmas of bridging cultures. Raised in Harlem by Caribbean immigrant parents, she had been one of the few black women within the lesbian bar culture that flourished in post-World War II New York City.

Her poetry increasingly dealt with multiple identities. “I who am bound by my mirror / as well as my bed / see causes in color/ as well as sex,” she wrote in “The Black Unicorn” (New York: Norton, 1978). Along with members of the Combahee River Collective, Lorde helped found Kitchen Table—Women of Color Press. Her autobiographical prose includeds The Cancer Journals (1980), and Sami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982).

–From The Essential Feminist Reader edited by Estelle B. Freedman

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House Audre Lorde (1984)

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and womenidentified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women “who attempt to emancipate themselves ay perhaps too high a price for the results,” as this paper states.

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power I rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each other?

In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We do not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art our of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work our of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, which feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us—white and Black— when it is key to our survival as a movement?

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.

Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.” Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.

Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.

Lying is your trademark.

And you have lied so much to me

(Lied about the world, lied about me)

That you have ended by imposing on me An image of myself.

Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,

That s the way you have forced me to see myself

I detest that image! What’s more, it’s a lie!

But now I know you, you old cancer,

And I know myself as well.

~ Caliban, in Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest

Citation: Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007. Print.

4

hooks, bell. 1998. “Black Women and Feminism.”

More than a hundred years have passed since the day Sojourner Truth stood before an assembled body of white women and men at an antislavery rally in Indiana and bared her breasts to prove that she was indeed a woman. To Sojourner, who had traveled the long road from slavery to freedom, the baring of her breasts was a small matter. She faced her audience without fear, without shame, proud of having been born black and female. Yet the white man who yelled at Sojourner, ‘I don’t believe you really are a woman,’ unwittingly voiced America’s contempt and disrespect for black womanhood. In the eyes of the 19th century white public, the black female was a creature unworthy of the title woman; she was mere chattel, a thing, an animal. When Sojourner Truth stood before the second annual convention of the women’s rights movement in Akron, Ohio, in 1852, white women who deemed it unfitting that a black woman should speak on a public platform in their presence screamed: ‘Don’t let her speak! Don’t let her speak! Don’t let her speak!’ Sojourner endured their protests and became one of the first feminists to call their attention to the lot of the black slave woman who, compelled by circumstance to labor alongside black men, was a living embodiment of the truth that women could be the work equals of men.

It was no mere coincidence that Sojourner Truth was allowed on stage after a white male spoke against the idea of equal rights for women, basing his argument on the notion that woman was too weak to perform her share of manual labor that she was innately the physical inferior to man. Sojourner quickly responded to his argument, telling her audience:

Well, children, whar dar is so much racket dar must be something out o’kilter. I tink dat ‘twixt de niggers of de Sour and de women at de Norf all a talkin ’bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talkin ’bout? Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best places . . . and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! . . . I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well—and ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children and I seen ’em mos all sold off into slaver); and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus hear—and ain’t I a woman?

Unlike most white women’s rights advocates, Sojourner Truth could refer to her own personal life experience as evidence of woman’s ability to function as a parent; to be the work equal of man; to undergo persecution, physical abuse, rape, torture; and to not only survive but emerge triumphant.

[Excerpted from ‘Black Women and Feminism’, in Ain’t I a Woman (London: Pluto Press, 1982), 159-60.]

Citation: hooks, bell. 1998. “Black Women and Feminism.” In Feminisms, edited by Sandra. Kemp and Judith. Squires. Oxford Readers. New York: Oxford University Press

II

Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome: Part Two

For 9/8, continue to use hypothesis.is to annotate as you review and read.

See Workshop 3.

5

Rome Timeline and Maps

Please take a few minutes to explore this TIMELINE and these MAPS for an introduction to the chronology and geography of Ancient Rome.

6

“Early Rome to 500 B.C.E.”

CHAPTER 3
Early Rome to 500 B.C.E.

From: Schultz, Celia E., Allen M. Ward, F. M. Heichelheim, and C. A. Yeo. 2019a. “Early Rome to 500 B.C.E.” In A History of the Roman People, 7th edition. New York: Routledge

The stories of Rome’s founding and the so-called Monarchy, or Regal Period, which ended ca. 500 B.C.E., present many problems for the modern historian. The traditional accounts found in ancient literary sources were not formed until hundreds of years after the events narrated therein. For example, an antiquarian named Marcus Terentius Varro in the late first century B.C.E. calculated the equivalent of April 21 753 B.C.E. as the date of Rome’s founding. Moreover, the ancient literary sources do not always square either with each other or with the vast amount of physical evidence excavated by archaeologists since the late nineteenth century. Therefore, trying to construct a coherent and credible picture out of the disparate literary and archaeological evidence is a major challenge.

THE ANCIENT LITERARY TRADITION AND ITS SOURCES

The oldest extant literary accounts of any significance all come from the second half of the first century B.C.E. The first is the second book of Cicero’s dialogue De Re Publica (ca. 50 B.C.E.). The most influential account is Book One of Livy’s 142-book history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita (ca. 25 B.C.E.). Later Imperial writers like Florus in the second century C.E. and Aurelius Victor, Eutropius, Festus, Orosius, and Julius Obsequens in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. basically repeat Livy’s account, which had become the dominant historical narrative. Poets of the Imperial Period, such as Vergil, Horace, [38] Ovid, and Propertius, are another important part of the literary tradition of Rome’s early days.

Greek writers ere also interested in Rome’s beginnings. Among the most important sources are the first four books of the Roman Antiquities by the Greek author Dionysius ofHalicarnassus (ca. 7 B.C.E.). Books Seven to Nine of the world history by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek from Sicily, are fragmentary but still important (ca. 30 B.C.E.). Plutarch was a Greek biographer and essayist in the late first or early second century C.E. He supplements the earlier historians, particularly in his “biographies” of the supposed early Roman kings Romulus and Numa Pompilius. Finally, Cassius Dio was a Bithynian Greek and high Roman official in the late second and early third centuries C.E. He covers early Rome in the first three books of his Roman History, but these books are preserved only in fragments.

It is important to remember that all of these ancient writers approached the writing of history as a branch of rhetoric. They wanted to entertain and morally instruct readers with memorable characters, exciting stories, and artful speeches. Also, their imagined view of the past was shaped by their own political concerns and experiences during the civil wars that destroyed the Roman Republic.

The sources of our sources

As the Roman literary tradition now exists, it rests on the mostly lost works of antiquarian researchers, earlier historians, and the writers of patriotic epics and drama. In the late third and early second centuries B.C.E., a number of historians (many of them called annalists because they narrated events on a year-by-year basis) and patriotic epic poets tried to present coherent versions of early Roman history (pp. 197-200). The annalists were mainly senatorial aristocrats, who were prone to exaggerating the roles of their own ancestors in historical events and who tended toward a pro-senatorial view of events and toward moralizing patriotism. These accounts are all lost but can be partially reconstructed from surviving later works, which ultimately depend on them. Also, during the second and first centuries B.C.E., antiquarian researchers preserved, and often misinterpreted, interesting or obscure facts about early Roman institutions, religion, life, and events. Their detailed and learned studies became raw material for other writers.

The data on which the poets, annalists, and antiquarians had to draw were not so scanty or worthless as many have assumed. Various traditional practices and oral sources preserved much authentic information, however imperfectly understood or distorted during transmission. Important families maintained wax images (imagines) and carved portraits of great ancestors. They sang or recited the exploits of the deceased during banquets, at funerals, and on military campaigns. Stories of major civic events were sometimes retold in dramatic performances. Some temples maintained their own archives of material, and some elements of ritual were maintained for hundreds of years. Archaic political institutions and practices were never completely abandoned. They were frequently overlaid with new ones as changed conditions required. [39]

In addition to the raw materials available for history writing in Rome itself, Rome’s Latin, Etruscan, and Greek neighbors had other customs, oral traditions, monuments, and records that Romans could utilize in reconstructing their early days. The earliest written accounts of Roman history were found in Greco-Sicilian historians like Timaeus (ca. 356-260 B.C.E.) and Philinus (ca. 250 B.C.E.). They were the models for early Roman accounts and preserved information from the traditions of the cities of Magna Graecia, which had had contacts with early Rome.

Although the Romans did not start writing literature until the middle of the third century B.C.E., literacy had a long history in Latium and Rome. The earliest known inscription written in a Greek alphabet was not found in Greece or the western Greek colonies, but in Latium. It appears on a small vase from a grave dated ca. 770 B.C.E. at Gabii. In Rome, the earliest known piece of writing is the possessive form of the Greek name Ktektos or Kleiklos on a Corinthian pot from a grave dated between ca. 730 and 625 B.C.E. The earliest public inscription yet found in Rome is the Lapis Niger, or Black Stone inscription, named for the black stone under which it was found in the Roman Forum (p. 48). It dates to some time in the sixth century B.C.E.

By 625 B.C.E., Rome had reached a significant level of urbanization. Some kinds of documentary records were needed. It is not likely that any records from that era were systematically maintained. Still, some information may have been kept on papyrus, cloth, or wood. Major items like laws, religious dedications, treaties, and commemorative inscriptions on public buildings were set up on durable stone or bronze. In the late first century B.C.E., school children were still memorizing the text of Rome’s first law code, the Twelve Tables, which was compiled in the mid-fifth century B.C.E. (pp. 87-8).

Many have assumed that little of the documentation that existed before ca. 500 B.C.E. could have survived the sack of Rome by marauding Gauls ca. 390 B.C.E. Recent research, however, indicates that the devastation has been exaggerated. Records on durable materials like stone and bronze probably were largely unaffected. More perishable records were housed in buildings such as the temple of Saturn, the Capitol, and the Regia, where the Pontifex Maximus (Chief Pontiff) performed important duties and kept his archives during the Republic (p. 76). Those buildings remained intact. Records kept there may well have survived.

RECONSTRUCTING EARLY ROMAN HISTORY

For the period before 500 B.C.E., however, the surviving oral materials and written documentation were sufficient to construct the detailed picture our sources give us. No matter how much oral, monumental, and documentary material was available to later poets, historians, and antiquarians, its original context and meaning were not always clear to them, and they faced the task of making sense of information preserved haphazardly. Thus our authors filled in gaps as suited their own needs and circumstances, creating a foundation story that is far from historically accurate but that still contains valuable pieces of information that may ultimately rest on ancient oral traditions or documents and can help scholars make sense of raw archaeological data. [40]

The traditional story of Rome’s founding

The basic outline of the highly fictional traditional account of Rome’s origin is as follows: the Trojan prince Aeneas, a hero from Homeric Greek epic, supposedly escaped the falI of Troy with his aged father, Anchises, and his young son, Ascanius (lulus). After many years of wandering, he landed in Latium. There, he met the Greek hero Evander, who already bad settled at the future site of Rome on the Palatine Hill. Aeneas also met Latinus, king of the Latins. He won the hand of Latinus’ daughter, Lavinia, after a war with Turnus, the man to whom she was already engaged. Then he founded a city named Lavinium in his new wife’s honor. Aeneas’ son, Ascanius (Iulus), subsequently founded Alba Longa.

Much later, Numitor, the twelfth Alban king after Ascanius, had a daughter, Rhea Silvia (Ilia). Numitor’s brother, Amulius, overthrew him and forced Rhea Silvia to join the Vestal Virgins. She became pregnant by the god Mars and bore two sons Romulus and Remus. Amulius ordered them to be killed. They were set adrift on the Tiber and washed up on shore near the site of Rome. There, a she-wolf found them and suckled them. They were discovered by a shepherd, Faustulus, who raised them. Subsequently, they argued over founding a settlement near the site of their miraculous rescue. Romulus killed Remus and founded a settlement on the Palatine Hill. He populated it with men who were exiles and fugitives from all over Italy. Lacking wives, Romulus and his men carried off the women of a nearby Sabine village. The resultant war ended in a reconciliation of the two groups and an amalgamation under the joint rule of Romulus and Titus Tatius, the Sabine leader.

Deconstructing the traditional story

This highly fictional account reflects the combination of various Greek, Etruscan, Latin, and Roman legends. Greek settlers in Italy and Sicily wanted to link their area with the glorious epic traditions of their native land. The legendary wanderings of Odysseus in The Odyssey provided a handy link. One Greek story (ca. 600 B.C.E.) after the founding of Greek colonies on the Bay of Naples called Latinus a son of Circe and Odysseus and made him king of the Etruscans. The Greeks often did not distinguish between the Etruscans and the Latins. Latinus is obviously a manufactured eponym (a person for whom something is named or supposedly named) for Latium and the Latins. Later Greeks, perhaps as early as the sixth century B.C.E., may have added the story of Aeneas’ journey to Italy. Aeneas quickly became associated with the Etruscans. They were the great foes of the Greeks in Italy, as the Trojans had been of the earlier Greeks in the Homeric epics.

The Etruscans eagerly adopted Aeneas as their own. Through him, they could have a past as ancient and glorious as that of their Greek rivals. Sixth-century B.C.E. votive statues of Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, have been found at Veii. The same scene appears on seventeen vases found in Etruscan tombs of the late sixth and early fifth centuries B.C.E. Perhaps Roman kings of Etruscan origin during the sixth century B.C.E. popularized the links with the Greek epic tradition. [41]

The story of the she-wolf in the legend ofRome’s founding may have had an Etruscan origin. Although the most famous representation of the wolf, the great bronze she-wolf (with suckling twin boys added in the Renaissance) in modern Rome’s Capitoline Museum, has now been identified on the basis of extensive scientific tests as a medieval piece, there are other images of her that are genuinely ancient. For example, a relief on an Etruscan grave stele dated ca. 400 B.C.E. from Felsina (Bologna) depicts what seems to be a she-wolf suckling a single baby boy, and an engraved Etruscan mirror dated ca. 340 B.C.E. displays a she-wolf nursing two infants.

The story that Romulus and Remus came from Alba Longa and founded Rome is part of the earliest Latin tradition. In the Regal Period, Alba Longa was Rome’s chief rival for leadership of the other Latin towns. The story would have been useful propaganda to bolster Alba’s claim to leadership. Archaeological evidence does show close connections between early Rome and Alba but cannot be used to prove any Alban origin for Rome.

Archaeological excavations have made clear that the site of Rome was inhabited long before the city’s traditional founding in 753 B.C.E. Discoveries on the Palatine Hill and in the area of the Roman Forum that sits at its foot do not, despite some romantic interpretations, support the idea that Romulus and Remus were actual historical characters or that some other specific character founded Rome around that time. The characters Romulus and Remus look like two slightly different versions of the typical eponymous hero whose name is actually derived from the name of the city which he is supposed to have founded. Later Romans would have been familiar with such stories from the Greek settlers in southern Italy. In fact, one Greek legend claims that Rome was founded by Rhomus, another son of Odysseus and Circe.

One of the last elements to become part of the standard legend was the list of Alban kings. As Greek scholars and historians became more skilled, they became concerned with establishing precise chronologies. In the early part of the third century B.C.E., the Sicilian Greek Timaeus wrote the first comprehensive history of the western Greeks and events relevant to them. He equated the foundation date of Rome with that of Carthage, supposedly the equivalent of 814 B.C.E. About fifty years later, another Greek, Eratosthenes, established the standard date in antiquity for the fall of Troy, the equivalent of 1184 B.C.E. Clearly, even if Aeneas had existed, he could not have wandered 370 years (the time between the Trojan War and Eratosthenes’ date for the founding of Rome) before getting to Italy. To plug the chronological gap, the ancients used the list of kings of Alba Longa, descended from Aeneas’s son and going all the way down to Numitor, the grandfather of Romulus.

The rise of Greek city-states and its impact on Rome

It is clear that the traditional narrative of Rome’s founding is completely unhistorical in its details. The idea that Rome originated with a specific act by a specific founder goes back to Classical and Hellenistic Greek historians who were trying to link Rome with their own “heroic” past. They also had in mind the examples of numerous Greek cities specifically established by founders as independent colonies in the Archaic Age and by kings as military outposts, centers ·of trade or seats of royal administration in the [42] Hellenistic Age. Still, in a very general sense, chose who created the ancient accounts of Rome’s founding were right in considering Rome to be no different from the early Greek city-states and in placing its origin after the Trojan War of epic tradition at the end of what is now called the Bronze Age. The accumulation of archaeological evidence shows that Rome originated as part of the larger, unconscious process that produced city-states all over the Mediterranean world and even on the shores of the Black Sea between ca. 1000 and 600 B.C.E.

A city-state is characterized by a complex urban center containing a significant number of socially and economically differentiated inhabitants. It provides a central location for services such as health care, markets, defense, law enforcement, courts, large-scale communal worship or cultural events, education, and entertainment to both its inhabitants and those of a relatively compact dependent rural territory. Finally, it is controlled by a formally organized state apparatus (government).

At the end of the early Iron Age and the beginning of the archaic period (ca. 900- 700 B.C.E.), Greeks, Phoenicians, and other Near Easterners took part in the expanding world of commerce and craft manufacturing. Those activities supported the growth of small villages and informal communities into formally organized urban centers in the Aegean. Although the Greeks borrowed many things from their neighbors, they developed their own distinctive social and political form of the city-state, the polis (pl., poleis). It was a self-governing community in which formal political power and rights were spread among a significant number of free inhabitants believed to be of common ancestry and legally recognized as citizens.

Initially, power in the Greek world had devolved into the hands of local chiefs and strongmen in the aftermath of the late Bronze Age. Later, as more formally organized urban or proto-urban communities emerged, some of the local leaders rose to positions of individual power as kings within the growing communities. These kings, however, were not rooted in a long tradition of dynastic monarchy. They were always limited in personal power. Rather, they depended on the cooperation and support of other important members of the community, who considered themselves to be more or less equal to any king. Often, powerful individuals even competed to become the next king. Usually, that competition led to the elimination of kingship altogether and the sharing of power among the heads of a community’s leading families. They became an exclusive aristocracy and competed among themselves for election to positions of leadership in the community.

As many of these communities continued to grow, social and economic changes sparked internal conflicts. Sometimes, a particularly shrewd or ambitious man would take advantage of these conditions to gain enough popularity and armed support to seize personal control as a tyrant. His son or grandson, however, was usually overthrown. Subsequent periods of violence and compromise gradually placed more formal rights and political privileges in the hands of moderately well-to-do non-aristocrats. They had enough resources to serve in the heavily armed hoplite infantry, which became the main defense of the archaic and early classical poleis.

In Italy between ca. 750 and 300 B.C.E., Rome and other communities in Etruria, Latium, and Campania, neighbors to the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily, followed [43] a similar trajectory. Therefore, the development of Rome should be seen as part of the same process that made the polis the dominant type of state in the Classical Mediterranean world. That dominance was not supplanted until the rise of Hellenistic monarchies in the East. At the same time, Rome outgrew the territorial and demographic constraints of the traditional polis and became the dominant state first in Italy and then in the West.

Early Rome and Latium

Excavations indicate that the site of Rome has been continuously inhabited since between 1200 and 1000 B.C.E. It seems, however, that important changes leading ultimately to urbanization began around the middle of the eighth century B.C.E. Some ancient Roman religious institutions, rites, and monuments that still existed in later centuries may have had their origin in the mid-eighth century B.C.E. That may account for calculations like Varro’s, which place the permanent settlement and foundation of Rome around the same time. Indeed, the archaeological evidence is compatible with the idea that small Iron Age villages found on some of the hills that Rome came to encompass began to expand and coalesce into a larger entity in that era.

Prior to the eighth century, the Indo-European-speaking villagers, who were similar to people who inhabited the rest of Latium, pursued simple lives as farmers and herders. Their lives are reflected in their graves and in later Roman legends, religious customs, and language. For example, Rome’s legendary eponymous founder and his twin brother, Remus, allegedly were raised in a shepherd’s cottage. The festival of the Parilia on April 21, the day on which Romulus supposedly founded Rome, celebrated a cleanup day for stalls and stables. In honor of Tel/us, or Mother Earth-the goddess of the fruitfulness of animals as well as of crops-the early Romans twice annually celebrated the festival of the Fordicidia: they sacrificed a pregnant cow in the spring and a pregnant sow in early winter.

Because of this pastoral tradition, the Romans, like the other peoples of the Ancient Mediterranean, sacrificed animals to their gods: goats, sheep, and cattle being the most popular offerings. Traces of the same background are evident in the name given to one of their city gates, the Mooing Gate (Porta Mugonia), as well as in the words egregia (meaning “out of the flock” and, therefore, “excellent”) and pecunia (first meaning “wealth in flocks,” but later “money” in general).

Even so, pastoralism could not have been pursued on a very large scale until the Romans had access to wider grazing lands and gained command of the trails to summer pastures in the Apennines. Perhaps standing behind the story of the Sabine women and the amalgamation with Latium’s Sabine neighbors are later battles for those trails and treaties giving the Romans access to summer pastures in the mountains, the Sabines access to winter pastures in the lower Tiber valley, and both the right of intermarriage.

Meanwhile, the Iron Age villagers had other sources of livelihood. They fished; raised pigs :ind chickens; and planted gardens of turnips, peas, beans, lettuce, and obbage. On small plots of land adjacent to their houses, they cultivated spelt, a hard kind [44] of emmer wheat. Like durum, it was more suitable for making porridge than bread. People probably also gathered wild grapes and figs, which they either ate as fruit or brewed into wine.

They wore coarse, homespun clothing and used crude, handmade pottery fired without kilns. They seem to have imported little except some simple jewelry and bronze or iron tools. Their houses, like those associated with the Villanovan culture (p. 8), were round or elliptical huts with thatched roofs and wattle-and-daub walls supported by a framework of posts and poles. Smoke from the fireplace escaped through a hole in the roof, and a single large doorway served for additional lighting and ventilation. Foundations of such houses have been found on the Palatine Hill, in the Roman Forum, and at other sites in Latium.

1000 to 700 B.C.E.

The earliest graves at Rome are simple cremation burials found in the Forum. The oldest are dated between 1000 and 900 B.C.E., although late Bronze Age graves recently found near Ostia may cause the date to be revised upward. They and many similar burials have been found elsewhere in Latium and reflect the proto-Villanovan culture of the late Bronze Age shared by other people in Italy. From about 900 to about 830 B.C.E., cremation burials continued in the Forum. Along with them appear simple inhumation burials typical of the Latial culture that emerged in the early Iron Age throughout Latium. Around 830 B.C.E., a new cemetery with only inhumation burials was opened up on the Esquiline. Each male inhumation burial in both the Forum and Esquiline cemeteries between ca. 900 and 770 B.C.E. contained only two or three ordinary vases, a bronze fibula (a large safety pin, pl. fibulae), and, in contrast with later times, no weapons. A female burial usually contained a.fibula and jewelry, mainly rings and glass or amber beads, along with spindle whorls and loom weights for spinning and weaving.

Clearly, no radical changes took place during this period, but evidence of population growth appears at the site of Rome and other places in Latium between 830 and 770 B.C.E. At Rome, dwellings spread from the Palatine to the Capitoline and Forum. The increased population and the habitation of the Forum probably necessitated the opening of the new burial ground on the Esquiline. By about 770 B.C.E., the growth of Rome and many other Latin communities had caught up with that of communities in Etruria. Both sets of communities were now poised to develop in tandem under the stimulus of increasing trade, particularly with the neighboring Greeks and Phoenicians, as is made clear by the discovery of Greek pottery (some bearing inscriptions in Greek) and Phoenician transport containers for wine, called amphorae, in Rome and the surrounding area. Early interaction with the wider Mediterranean world is also evidenced by the foundation of a cult of the Greek god Hercules, associated with trade, in the Forum Boarium. This may be due to the presence of Greek traders, or possibly even to Phoenician traders in Rome. The Phoenician god Melqart was equated with Hercules and was often the first deity to whom the Phoenicians would dedicate a temple in a new place. [45]

The seventh century B.C.E.

The level of material culture in Rome and Latium changed enormously in the seventh century B.C.E. during the Orientalizing Period (p. 22). Princely tombs rivaling those of Etruria h:ive been excavated south of Rome at Castel di Decima and Acqua Acetosa, Laurentina, and to the east at Praeneste. Graves at the first two sites contained men and women richly dressed with gold, silver, and bronze ornaments. Swords, lances, shields, and even chariots accompanied many of the men. At least one of the women at each site also had a chariot. The one at Acqua Acetosa, Laurentina, resembled a type found in Assyria. Some of the women had all the equipment for presiding over a sumptuous banquet- imported Greek pottery and Punic wine amphorae included. The tombs from Praeneste contained elaborate gold jewelry from workshops in Etruria, silver bowls with pseudo-Egyptian reliefs, bronze tripods from the Near East, bronze cauldrons decorated with oriental motifs like griffin heads, and many items carved from elephant ivory. The ivory could have originated only in Syria or Africa even if the carving was done by local craftsmen.

Parallels exist at Rome. One of the mid-seventh-century B.C.E. trench graves on the Esquiline contained a unit of armor and a chariot. A seventh-century B.C.E. grave in the Forum contained glass-paste beads, a bracelet of ivory, and a disc of amber from northern Europe. Others show that imports of expensive metalware and pottery from Etruria increased greatly after about 625 B.C.E.

During the seventh century B.C.E., the site of Rome acquired substantial private and public buildings similar to those appearing at the sites in central Italy and decorated in a similar style. Architectural remains excavated in the Forum show that by ca. 625 B.C.E., substantial houses were being built. They had stone walls made of square blocks of tufa and roofs of heavy terracotta tiles supported on wooden beams. The houses also had archaic terracotta decorations like those found on buildings from the same period in Etruria. At about the same time, the Forum received its first pavement and a formal drain, the Cloaca Maxima. Also, a new street was laid over a filled-in space between the northeast corner of the Palatine and the Velia. Therefore, what had once been a loose collection of Iron Age hilltop villages by the Tiber had truly become the city of Rome.

The growth of separate villages into a significant town during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. can be traced in some of the archaic Roman religious practices that survived into historical times. The religious festival of the Septimontium (Seven Hills or Enclosed Hills) seems to have originated in the establishment of a common religious festival by the communities on the Palatine, Esquiline, and Caelian hills. They actually embrace seven separate heights: the Esquiline and its three projections, the Oppius, the Cispius, and the Fagutal; the Palatine; the Velia; and the Caelian. Religious association seems to have led to a political union under the Palatine community prior to the later incorporation of the Quirinal.

Two ancient priesthoods, the Salii and the Luperci (p. 83), were each divided into two groups, one representing the Palatine and one the Quirinal. This practice may indicate that the priesthoods originally were common to two independent communities. According to Livy (Book 2.13), the combination of the Palatine and Quirinal [46] communities resulted in what is known as Roma Quadrata, Rome of the Four Regions: the Palatine, Esquiline, Caelian, and Quirinal hills. These four regions also seem to fall generally within an early circuit of the pomerium.

The pomerium was the sacred boundary between the civil and the military spheres. This line did not necessarily correspond with the city’s fortified walls or the zone of habitation. According to a legend, Romulus marked out the first pomerium when he founded Rome on the Palatine (p. 53). The eighth-century wall found on the Palatine may be such a sacred boundary even though it does not support the existence of Romulus. An extension of the pomerium traditionally ascribed to King Servius Tullius seems to correspond with Rome of the Four Regions.

THE EARLY ROMAN STATE

The combined archaeological and literary evidence indicates that not only the city but also the state that can be called Rome came into existence around 625 b.c. That was about when the Forum was paved and began to receive monumental shrines and temples. These projects required a greater coordination of labor and resources than an informal community could have commanded.

A state implies some kind of formal political institutions and practices that are collectively identified as its constitution. Rome never had a written constitution. As in Great Britain today, only a constantly growing and changing body of custom, precedent, and legislation determined what the “constitution” was at any historical moment. The archaic constitution of the Regal Period could not have been complex, but little is actually known about it. What can be said has to be deduced or inferred from archaeological evidence, comparison with monarchies in other societies at a similar stage of development, and the vestiges preserved in the Republic that followed.

The kings

According to tradition, Rome was ruled from its founding to 509 b.c. by seven kings (Titus Tatius, Romulus’ brief Sabine colleague, being excluded). The first four were alternately Latin and Sabine: Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, and Ancus Marcius. The last three were Tarquinius Priscus (Tarquin the Elder), Servius Tullius, and Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud). The two Tarquins were always recognized as Etruscan, but the question of Servius’ Latin or Etruscan origin is in doubt. The names notwithstanding, it is a reasonable assumption that early Rome came to be ruled by kings, and so, too, did other archaic Latin city-states, such as Aricia, Tusculum, and Lanuvium.

That kings ruled Rome in the sixth century B.C.E. is supported by two pieces of explicit archaeological evidence. The first, dated to the last quarter of the century, is part of a bucchero cup clearly inscribed with the word rex, king. Moreover, it was excavated at the site of the Regia, the King’s House—the royal palace. The Regia’s successive restorations and re- buildings on the same site in the Roman Forum can be traced back to a date even earlier than the traditional founding date of the city (p. 30). The Romans believed that it was originally built by Romulus’ successor, King Numa. It was next to the temple of Vesta and the house of the Vestal Virgins, whose origins may go back to a date even earlier than the traditional founding date of the city (p. 42).  [47]

The Romans believed that it was originally built by Romulus’ successor, King Numa. It was next to the temple of Vesta and the house of the Vestal Virgins (p. 70). After the Monarchy, the Regia became the headquarters of the Pontifex Maximus, who assumed some of the religious functions of the old kings.

The second piece of evidence is the Lapis Niger (Black Stone) inscription on a block of Grotta Oscura tufa under the black pavement of the Forum. The inscription is dated to the late sixth century B.C.E. It contains the word RECEI, a form of the word rcx (king). In later times, it was believed to mark the grave of one of the early kings.

That certain terms and titles related to kings were used during the Republic also indicates the existence of kings in an earlier stage of political development. In the Republic, an elective office might become vacant because of death, resignation, or the failure to hold elections on time. In that case, the senate would declare an interregnum, which literally meant “a period between kingships.” Then, it would appoint an interrex, interim king, to hold an election for the office. From early in the Republic, the word rex was also used in the title of an important priest, the rcx sacrorum, king of rites. His job was to carry on religious functions that probably belonged originally to the kings. His wife was called regina sacrorum queen of rites, and she, too, had a prescribed set of religious duties.

While the existence of early Roman kings seems clear, the detailed accounts of the kings found in the literary sources must be rejected. First, as previously noted, the name of Romulus, Rome’s supposed founder and first king, seems obviously to be a made-up eponym. Second, even with Romulus, there are not enough kings to cover the period from 753 to 509 B.C.E. They require improbably long reigns averaging thirty-five years. It is more probable that the earliest records went back to only ca. 625 B.C.E. Depending on the inclusion or exclusion of Titus Tatius, six or seven kings between ca. 625 and 509 B.C.E. would yield much more probable average reigns of seventeen to twenty years. On the other hand, there is no reason to reject the story that a man whose Roman name became Tarquinius successfully migrated to Rome from Tarquinia and eventually became king. The archaeological record shows that Greeks, Etruscans, and Phoenicians frequented the important trading center that was archaic Rome, and there is every reason to believe that a number settled there.

An apparently independent Etruscan tradition is depicted in the François Tomb near Vulci. It supports the existence of the Tarquins and antedates the earliest Roman historical speculations. What probably should be rejected, however, is the idea of a longterm Etruscan takeover of Rome. In the light of current archaeological evidence, it is much more probable that seventh-century B.C.E. Rome looked like an Etruscan city because both Rome and the contemporary “Etruscan” cities were part of a larger, central Italian cultural complex. A sharp distinction between the two is valid only later when the people who inhabited Rome had developed a clearly different culture from that which prevailed in those cities of Etruria with whom they later fought.

The nature of early Roman kingship

Like kingship in many early or “primitive” societies, the early Roman monarchy probably had religious origins and was not absolute or strictly hereditary. That king had [48] important religious duties seems clear from the existence of the rex sacrorum during the Republic. The gods who guaranteed the welfare of the community would have been offended if they were not served by a king, as they always had been. The republican practice of appointing an interrex, interim king when certain elected magistrates were lacking :also supports the religious nature of early Roman kingship. First, the patricians in the senate, the patres, appointed one of themselves to be the interrex. They were the leading members of families who supplied Rome’s public priests (p. 70). Second, the interrex held and passed on to subsequently elected magistrates the religious power of taking auspices (p. 69). Presumably, the patres had this power because their ancestors during the Monarchy had chosen who was to be king when the throne was empty. It is also significant that the chief priest of the Roman Republic, the pontifex maximus, had his headquarters in the Regia, the old royal residence.

With the spread of more and better weapons in Latium, as evidenced by seventh-century graves, Roman kingship probably acquired an increasingly military nature. The republican interrex preserved not only the auspices but also the imperium, the power of military command, in the absence of proper magistrates. During the later Monarchy, kings probably had to become war leaders to protect the community. Some may even have started as leaders of warrior bands who forced their way onto the throne or were chosen kings because of their military prowess. At some point, it seems to have become necessary that the appointment of a king had to be ratified by an early assembly of arms-bearing men, the comitia curiata.

As the leading religious and military authority in the early state, the king would have had broad powers in peace and war. He probably had the power to make war and negotiate treaties. His final word on public affairs most likely had the force of law. The power to enforce laws and even execute wrongdoers seems to have been represented by the fasces and double-headed ax, ancient royal symbols that were later carried in front of magistrates with imperium during the Republic (p. 79). Still, the king could not have functioned alone. He seems to have sought the advice and approval of others to ensure his legitimacy.

The senate

As the Republic evolved, the senate became the state’s most powerful institution. Under the kings, however, it probably was just what its name implies, an advisory body of elders (senes, from which senior and senile derive) to the king. It would have only advised the kings in the Monarchy, just as it only advised the magistrates in the early Republic. It would have been a king’s private council, appointed by him from among his friends and important members of the city’s leading families. As in the Republic, the senate could not have legislated under the kings. It would have given advice only when summoned by the king. He would not have to accept its advice, but it would not have been politically wise for a king habitually to ignore or reject it, particularly on major issues. If he did, he would sooner or later incur the enmity of too many powerful men and might even lose his throne, as Roman tradition says the last Tarquin did. [49]

The Army and the Earliest Popular Assembly, the Comitia Curiata

The king also would have had to take into account the populus, the arms-bearing adult male citizens. They seem to have made up both the early army and the comitia curiata (Curiate Assembly), the original popular (derived from populus) assembly. The comitia curiata was based on the groups to which the adult arms-bearing men originally belonged for the purpose of military service. Originally, all citizens were divided up into three tribes (tribus, literally “by threes”): Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres. Each tribe probably represented a major district of the earliest city. Apparently each tribe was subdivided into ten smaller districts called curiae, from which is derived curiata, for a total of thirty curiae. At some point, perhaps with the incorporation of the community on the Quirinal Hill into the early Roman state, the population was divided into four urban tribes and twenty-six rural districts, pagi (sing. pagus), or regions, regiones (sing. regio). After that, each tribe and district supplied one of the thirty curiae of the army. In assembly, all of the men associated with each curia would have mustered together just as they would if called up for active military duty.

The armed citizens who constituted this assembly theoretically had sovereign power (maiestas), and they took part in the inauguration of a new king. That seems evident from the vestigial comitia curiata that confirmed a magistrate’s imperium in the Republic (p. 60). The Curiate Assembly may even have attended the king in the performance of some of his religious duties, confirmed the appointment of public priests, witnessed (if not approved) wills and adoptions, and dealt with other matters connected with private law. The assembly’s main function during the Monarchy was to listen to and show approval or disapproval of proposals put forward by the king. A king was wise to seek the comitia curiata’s approval, if only to win armed citizens’ cooperation and willing consent to major changes in law and policy.  Their opinion was particularly valuable in matters of war and peace.

The evolution of the army and a new popular assembly, the comitia centuriata.

Before Rome had developed into a fully organized state, warfare, such as it was, probably involved warrior bands loyal to individual leaders. Such bands may have been the origin of certain clans, gentes (pp. 60-3). Even under the Monarchy and early Republic, individual clans sometimes conducted independent military operations. The creation of a formal state and the full urbanization of Rome in the last quarter of the seventh century B.C.E. paralleled and was integral to the spread of new arms, armor, and military tactics in central Italy at the same time. A similar pattern had occurred at the beginning of the seventh century B.C.E. in Greece. The old, heroic style of combat involved a few elite warriors backed up by a rather disorganized mass of retainers as seen in Homer. It gradually gave way to tactics based on the hoplite phalanx.

The classic hoplite phalanx was a formation in which heavily armed infantry troops advanced to the attack in a tightly ordered battle line several ranks deep. Each soldier [50] carried a long spear for thrusting and a sword for close combat. He was protected by a hoplon (clipeus in Latin), a round shield smaller than earlier body shields. It was fastened to the left arm through a loop in the middle and a handgrip near the edge. A helmet, breastplate or corse- let, and greaves (shin guards), all made of various materials such as leather, heavy linen, and metal, completed the panoply. Each man’s right side was protected by the shield on his neighbor’s left. So long as each man kept in formation, the hoplite phalanx was almost indestructible.

Evidence from graves shows that the Greek hoplite panoply was introduced into Italy in the late seventh century B.C.E. It spread rapidly among those who could afford it. How early and to what extent the Romans and others in Italy adopted the classic Greek phalanx of hoplite infantry is problematical. Ancient and modern reconstructions of the Roman army in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E. may too neatly reflect the formal organization and tactics of later Greek and Roman armies. The following reconstruction is offered with that caveat.

The formal field army that emerged in tandem with the evolving state was the legion, legio , literally a “selection” or “levy.” It was drawn from all the able-bodied men who had the means to serve as cavalry or the Roman equivalent of hoplite heavy infantry. Collectively, those men may have been known as the classis , literally the “call-out” or “summoning.”

It is supposed that each of the ten curiae from each of Rome’s three original tribes provided the legion with a quota of ten to forty cavalry and one hundred heavy infantry from its members who met the qualifications for the classis . The resulting 3000 heavy infantry probably fought in a massed formation similar to the Greek phalanx . Men who could not meet the qualifications for the classis were thus infra classem , below the classis . They probably supplied more poorly armed auxiliary troops. They would have supported the heavy infantry as light infantry and skirmishers.

The infantrymen from each tribe seem to have been commanded by a tribal officer of the soldiers, tribunus militum. An analogous tribal officer of the cavalry, tribunus celerum (or equitum), seems to have commanded the cavalry supplied by each tribe. At the top, the supreme command belonged to the king or his appointee, the magister populi, master of the army. Next to the king or magister populi in rank was the commander of the whole cavalry, the magister equitum (master of the cavalry).

From the latter part of the sixth century B.C.E., the curiate organization of Roman manpower, now based on four urban tribes and twenty-six rural districts (pagi) or regions (regiones), became obsolete for military purposes. To align Rome’s military manpower with its growing wealth and population, the legion’s infantry was reorganized in accordance with the reforms ascribed to King Servius Tullius in the literary tradition (p. 58). All of the changes credited to Servius Tullius could not have happened at once and probably were not fully developed until well into the Republic. Still, it seems likely that Servius Tullius or someone like him increased the heavy infantry to 4000 men in 40 units now called centuries (centuriae), hundreds, instead of curiae. Later, the heavy infantry expanded to 6000 men in 60 centuries. The officer in charge of each century naturally became known as a centurion. [51]

Another part of the “Servian” reform was the consolidation of rural districts into larger geographical units to create rural tribes along with the four urban ones. As the state grew in population and territory during later periods, the number of urban tribes remained fixed at four, but new rural tribes were added until a limit of thirty-one rural tribes was reached. E:1eh tribe contributed similarly armed men to groups from which the field army, the legion ( legio ), was drawn. These groups also came to be called centuries , because originally one hundred men taken from each group formed one of the centuries of the legion. Eventually, the whole adult male citizen body was organized into 193 centuries. Men were ranked by the value of their property and the type of military service they could afford to provide. If not by the end of the Monarchy, then in the early Republic, adult male citizens assembling by centuries became the comitia centuriata (Centuriate Assembly) and replaced the comitia curiata as Rome’s primary popular assembly.

THE GENERAL PICTURE

Despite problems presented by the late literary accounts of Rome’s early history and with the help of a growing body of archaeological evidence, historians can construct a general picture of Rome’s origin and early growth as a city and a state. Beginning in the early to mid-eighth century B.C.E., a handful of small agricultural villages on a group of hills by the eastern bank of the lower Tiber River began to coalesce. They had evolved into a true city and state that can be called Rome by the last quarter of the seventh century B.C.E. Location on advantageous trade routes had greatly stimulated this devclopment and created a thriving urban center in the same cultural context as that of contemporary Etruscan cities. By the end of the sixth century B.C.E., Rome had acquired a relatively sophisticated political and military organization. It was on par with the major archaic city-states of Greece and the rest of central Italy. Rome may well have been ruled by kings of Etruscan origin in the last part of the sixth century near the end of the Regal Period, but that does not mean it was controlled by some external Etruscan power. Indeed, it had become a significant force in its own right in Latium and southern Etruria.

SUGGESTED READING

Cornell, T. J. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000-264 b.c.). London and New York Routledge, 1995.

Fulminante, F. The Urbanization of Rome and Latium Vetus: From the Bronze Age to the Archaic Era. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Smith, C. J. Early Rome and Latium. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Wiseman, T. P. Clio’s Cosmetics. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979.

7

“Early Roman Society, Religion, and Values”

CHAPTER 4
Early Roman Society, Religion, and Values

From: Schultz, Celia E., Allen M. Ward, F. M. Heichelheim, and C. A. Yeo. 2019a. “Early Roman Society, Religion, and Values” In A History of the Roman People, 7th edition. New York: Routledge

To understand Roman history, it is necessary to understand the nature of Roman personal and social relations and the religious and ethical frameworks within which they functioned.

THE PRINCIPLE OF HIERARCHY

An operative principle in all aspects of Roman life was hierarchy, the ranking of people or things from higher status, power, privilege, or value to lower. Inequality was an accepted condition of life in the Romans’ view. Under ideal circumstances, those lower down in the hierarchy owed obedience to those above. In return, those above had a duty to benefit those lower down.

THE FAMILY

The Roman family was at the center of the hierarchical social and political system. Each family itself was hierarchically structured. A patriarch, called the paterfamilias (father of the family), stood at the top (pp. 54-5). The English word family is used to translate the Latin word familia, from which it is derived. The Roman concept is not so wide ranging as the English concept in some respects and is more extensive in others. The Romans recognized different types of [53] kinship connections that

English often loosely lumps under the term family. There were three major classes of kin in descending order of closeness: agnates (agnati), cognates (cognati), and affines (adfines/affines). Agnates were those related by blood or adoption through a father and his male relatives up and down the line: for example, a father’s brother or sister, a paternal grandfather, a brother or sister, a brother’s children, a son, or a son’s children. Cognates were those related by blood or adoption in general, but often were those specifically in the female line, the maternum genus: for example, a mother’s brother or sister, a maternal grandfather, a sister’s children, or a daughter’s children. Affines were relatives by marriage more broadly conceived than the English term in-fall’s designates. For example, a Roman would be an affine not only to a mother-in-law, father-in-law, sister-in-law. or son-in-law but also to their parents. A stepparent, stepsibing, or stepgrandchild would also be an affine because of the relationship created by the marriage of a blood relation such as one’s mother, father, or child.

Agnates were very important in Roman law for such things as determining one’s paterfamilias, inheriting property, or choosing the guardian of a minor child in case of intestacy. Cognates and affines, however, were also highly valued and important. Along with agnates, they provided the dense networks of relations that could support one’s position in the social and political hierarchy.

Somewhat confusingly, the term cognates was also used to refer to one’s immediate family, the domus (house): one’s parents, siblings, children, and siblings’ children. The familia was closely associated with the domus but included much more. It was, rather, a hierarchical association of housemates: one’s immediate family, clients (freeborn dependents), freed slaves (liberati), and slaves. Moreover, it included the spirits of deceased ancestors, the “greater ones” (maiores). They stood at the top of a generational hierarchy. Next were the living generations. Last were those yet unborn. The living had to serve the spirits of the dead, Di Manes, by maintaining the sacrifices and rituals of the family cult and following the mos maiorum (custom of the ancestors) with utmost respect. They also would seek to earn the respect of the unborn generations by enhancing the wealth and status of the family, of which the unborn would be the heirs.

The familia consisted of property as well as persons. It was an economic unit operating under self-given rules within the community’s larger economic framework. It was also a system of defense, law, and government-a miniature state. In the earliest phase of Roman law, it was recognized as a closed, self-sufficient, self-contained association. Finally, the familia was a religious organization, a community of worship centered on the cult of the hearth and the cult of the dead.

THE PATERFAMILIAS AND PATRIA POTESTAS

The paterfamilias, the patriarchal head of the Roman family, controlled the children in the family’s male, agnatic line. He continued to do so until he died or chose to release them from his control. He might have no children of his own; he might even be a bachelor. The only qualification was that he be subject to no authority save that of the state-that he be sui iuris. That is, he was legally independent and self-sufficient [54] in dealing with other families and the state. In a legal sense, he was the family, and without him, there was no family or household.

The paterfamilias‘ power within his family was called patria potestas (father’s power). It was., almost absolute. The paterfamilias was the legal owner of all family property. Only he could lend, mortgage, or sell it or engage in contracts involving the family. He was also the source of law within the family. His orders were recognized by the state as having the force of law. His authority was based on ancestral custom, of which he was legally the sole judge and interpreter. He was the judge of the household. His rulings normally could not be set aside by any external authority. Unless he was declared insane, he could kill, mutilate, expel, or give into bondage his children or housemates and could break or dispose of the household property as he wished.

The patria potestas was not supposed to be despotic or tyrannical power. The father was supposed to consult other members of the family, especially the adult males and his wife, the materfamilias. Together they constituted the family council (concilium). Along with patria potestas came a duty to promote the welfare of the entire family, not destroy it by abuse. Religiously reinforced respect for and obedience to tradition usually tempered the exercise of paternal authority. It was not a brutal display of force, but a recognized distribution of the only justice that could be secured until the “moral imperative” of custom was replaced later by the “legal imperative” established by the state.

FIGURE 4.1 Junius Brutus, a Roman noble, with busts of his ancestors; lifesize marble, first century CE. [55]

Men within the family and marriage

Unless a paterfamilias became insane or mentally incompetent or voluntarily emancipated those under his patria potestas, his role as head of the family terminated only at his death. During his lifetime, his power extended to all of his descendants in the direct male line. In theory, an adult Roman man, his wife (if she were not still under the authority of her own paterfamilias), his children, and his dependents could be under the authority of his grandfather or even great-grandfather. In practice, the low average life expectancy in ancient times made that highly unlikely.

Inscribed burial stones, monuments, and other documents from the late Republic and early Empire, especially from Roman Egypt, indicate that the average life expectancy at birth for upper-class men was about thirty years, and that the majority of men who survived to adulthood and married did so for the first time in their mid- to late twenties. Therefore, by the age of seventeen, more than half of the men documented would have lost their fathers. These ages may be even lower for the poorer classes, for whom some evidence suggests lower life expectancy and lower age at first marriage. Still, something less than 1 percent of the population may have reached eighty, and a few even attained one hundred.

A Roman boy could legally marry after he reached puberty, which came to be defined in law as fourteen years of age for males. That coincides with the usual practice of giving a boy his toga of manhood (toga virilis) in his fifteenth year. Still, there were many reasons for a man to put off marriage until his twenties or thirties. Beginning at age seventeen, citizens of middling wealth had to serve as many as six consecutive military campaigns in the infantry, and the wealthiest citizens had to serve ten in the cavalry. It took time for both small landholders and wealthy members of the elite to acquire the resources necessary to support an independent family and household. Sons of elite families needed to acquire the training and lower military and public offices that would show their promise as suitable mates for the daughters of other prominent families. Some who were still subject to the patria potestas of long-lived fathers might have preferred to wait until they were free of such control.

A paterfamilias might choose to emancipate a son from his patria potestas. To do so, he followed a procedure known as emancipatio. He sold the son three times to a cooperative third party, who freed the son after each “sale.” The son then became sui iuris (independent). Any male, even a minor too young to father children, became a paterfamilias after the death of his own paterfamilias. A paterfamilias usually provided in his will that a minor child be provided with a tutor (guardian), who would protect the child in his place. If he did not, one of his close male agnates automatically assumed the role. For boys, guardianship ended when they reached fourteen.

Women within the family and marriage

Within the familial hierarchy, women and children were always subject to the power of some adult male. It was a world where labor was scarce and only a father’s legitimate offspring, unless explicitly excluded in a will, had a guaranteed right to inherit [56] the property on which a family’s welfare depended. Men viewed the strict control of access to women’s labor and power of reproduction as an absolute necessity. A law in the Twelve Tables, about 450 b.c. (p. 66), specified that a woman was always to be in the position of a daughter or ward to some adult male: her father, her husband, or a tutor (guardian). Her tutor could be a close male relative among her father’s or husband’s agnates or someone named in her father’s or husband’s will.

A woman who had no living father and no husband who had acquired control over her was sui iuris , independent, to a certain extent despite having a tutor. She could not, however, buy or sell property or make contracts without the tutor’s permission. The only exceptions were the Vestal Virgins (p. 53). During the Republic, they were free of both the patria potestas and the requirement of a tutor. Still, the Vestal Virgins were supervised by the pontifex maximus , Rome’s male chief priest.

A husband acquired control over a wife and the property that came with her as a dowry through her transference co his manus (hand). He could acquire manus over his wife in three ways. The first was a complex religious marriage ceremony known as confarreatio involving the sacrifice to Jupiter of a special cake made from a variety of wheat called far. Except when it was required for certain priests, confarreatio was largely replaced over time by a simpler form of marriage with manus called coemptio . That involved the nominal sale of the bride by her paterfamilias or guardian to her husband. In the third form of marriage, which was like a common-law marriage, manus was established through usus (use). If a man and woman consented to live together as man and wife without interruption for a full year, the woman and her dowry automatically came under her husband’s control. To avoid ma1111s in this type of marriage and remain in the power of her father or guardian, a woman had to be absent from her husband’s home for at least three consecutive nights every year.

If a wife remained in her father’s power, whatever property she brought with her to her husband reverted to her father or father’s male heirs upon her husband’s death or the dissolution of the marriage. She could also inherit a share of her birth family’s property upon her father’s death. After that, however, she would need the approval of a guardian to dispose of her property by gift, sale, or will. If a woman passed into her husband’s control through marriage with manus , her dowry became her husband’s property. At first, her dowry had to be returned if her husband divorced her. Later, there had to be a premarital agreement for that to happen, if the husband died during the marriage, a wife could inherit a share of his property. Nevertheless, she would subsequently need the approval of a guardian to dispose of her property. A groom who was not independent needed the consent of his father or guardian for marriage, just as the bride always did. In early Rome, the couple’s consent may not have been needed, but later it was required. Since girls could marry at twelve and many were fourteen to eighteen years old at first marriage, such consent would have been mostly nominal anyway.

Frequently, girls in their teens were married to men twice their age. Having reached the point where he could support a family, a husband was anxious to have children while he had enough time to raise them. Childbirth was dangerous enough before the medical advances of the last 150 years. It was even more dangerous for young mothers whose bodies were not fully matured. Infant mortality was high for the same reasons. [57] Therefore, if the population was to grow at all, women had to average five or six life-threatening births in their relatively short lives.

Although a wife in a marriage with manus was never legally free of some man’s complete control, there were some compensations if she belonged to the propertied classes. Her position as materfamilias within a thriving household brought her honor in society and a significant role in the household economy. While her husband conducted business and public affairs outside the home, she was mistress within. She held the keys to the family storerooms and kept track of all that was brought in or disbursed. She supervised the slaves and dependents who processed food and fiber for the household. As the ideal good wife, she was expected to spin wool herself. She also looked after the raising of the children and served as a trusted advisor on matters affecting the family.

A wife’s primary name was always the name of her birth family (p. 61): when she married, her name did not usually change. Marriages were arranged primarily to benefit both partners’ families in terms of finances., social standing, and the production of children. A wife would have been keenly aware of the role that she played in promoting her family’s interests. Through her children, relatives, social connections, and inherited property, she could help to advance her family’s fortunes.

Although fairly common in later centuries, divorce in early Rome seems to have been rare and difficult because of the prevalence of marriage with manus. In marriage with manus, only the husband or his paterfamilias could initiate a divorce, and then only on very limited grounds. Such grounds seem co have been a wife’s attempt co poison her husband or his children, adultery, and drunkenness. Even if premarital provisions had been made to send a divorced wife back with her dowry to her father, the husband kept any children. If a husband divorced a wife on other than permissible grounds, he was liable to loss of his property. In marriage without manus, a wife who was sui iuris, or her paterfamilias if she was not, could also initiate divorce, but any children still stayed with the husband.

Children and the family

Tombstones, mostly from the period of the Late Republic and later, attest to deep affection between parents and children, and archaeology has revealed that Roman children played witb many of the same toys children pby with today: rattles for babies, dolls, spinning tops, games, and balls. But Roman childhood was not all fun and games. In the hierarchical world of Rome, the needs and emotions of children were often sacrificed to the greater needs of the parents and the larger welfare of the family. Children, particularly males, were essential to provide labor and to perpetuate the agnatic family. One could not, however, risk raising too many children. The family property would be dangerously diminished if there were too many children to provide with dowries and inheritances. If there were no sons, then adopting one, usually from one’s agnates, was favored. One of the hallmarks of Roman society is the ease with which they accepted adoption.

Given the fairly short life expectancy in ancient Rome, many children were deprived of one or both parents early in life. Widowed and divorced parents often remarried. [58] That meant many children had a stepparent, stepsiblings, and half-siblings. Orphans would be raised by their agnatic kin. Those relatives might resent their new wards, abuse them, or take advantage of them financially. Poor orphans and children of poor parents might end up simply abandoned or sold as slaves to be raised as thieves and prostitutes.

Right after birth, a newborn was placed before the feet of the father. He acknowledged its legitimacy and his desire to rear it by picking it up. Conversely, he had the right to kill or expose (abandon outside) any child that he did not want. Girls were likely to be rejected before boys. Still, the need for all families to have suitable wives for sons must have moderated the pressure against girls somewhat.

As noted above, unless a paterfamilias was insane or mentally incompetent, he could punish his children as he wished. He could sell them into slavery or even kill them. Like slaves, children could have a peculium, an amount of money for personal use, but their paterfamilias still had legal control over it. On the other hand, suits for actions committed by children still subject to patria potestas had to be brought against the paterfamilias. The authority of a paterfamilias over his children did not take precedence over their rights and duties as citizens or as soldiers. A paterfamilias, however, could use his power to punish adult children who did not live up to their civic obligations.

The family and the state

The hierarchical, authoritarian nature of the patriarchal Roman family shaped the early Roman State. Family life fostered obedience to authority and the willingness to do one’s duty. On the civic level, the king and, later, the Republic’s magistrates stood in a position of authority similar to that of the paterfamilias. They could expect the same kind of obedience from subordinates. As commanders in war, they had the right to execute anyone who refused to obey. Under normal circumstances, the obedience to authority fostered by the Roman family helped to hold in check the centrifugal forces that also existed within the state because of each family’s pursuit of its own interests.

What concerned the families as a group, particularly the most powerful among them, was the state, the res publica (literally the “common wealth” or “common thing,” “the community”). Its close connection with the fathers of the leading families is confirmed by the Latin word for country, patria. It comes from the adjective patrius, “belonging to the father.” Roman religion and law are thought to be extensions of the religious and ethical practices of the families and fathers who made up and controlled the community.

The predominance of the family over the state never completely disappeared in Roman history. That can be seen in the dynastic ambitions of Roman emperors right up to the end of the Empire. The family was a living thing; the state was not. Citizens could be motivated to benefit the state not so much for the state’s sake as for the honor, prestige, and glory gained for themselves and their families. Ancestral death masks and busts adorned the upper-class Roman home to remind the living of the standards to be met. The ancestors’ approval and the chance to perpetuate oneself in the memory of future generations were powerful incentives to civic action. Yet in periods of crisis where the interests of the family seemed to be at variance with those of the state, there was always a great temptation to sacrifice the state’s interests. Therefore, the state could become a battleground of competing interests among the powerful families that controlled it. [59]

PATRONS AND CLIENTS

In early Rome, a man not protected by a powerful paterfamilias was at the mercy of those above him in the social hierarchy. He could make up for this deficiency by attaching himself as a client (cliens) to a more powerful man, a patron (patronus). The patron would protect him in many of the same ways that a father would. The etymological connection between the words patronus and pater (father) is obvious. The relationship between patron and client was strengthened by the religiously sanctioned concept of fides, faithfulness in performing one’s obligations (p. 71). It was an offense against the gods for either a patron or a client, once having accepted their mutual relationship, to shirk their duties.

The attitudes behind the patron-client relationship also affected dealings between Rome and other states. It was always Roman policy to grant a treaty to others only from a position of strength and not accept one forced on Rome. Therefore, Rome assumed the superior position of a patron, not the inferior one of a client, nor even one of an equal partner. Fides obligated the Romans to abide by any treaty and look out for the interests of the other party. Conversely, the other party was expected to he a faithful client to its Roman patron in ways that often were not spelled out. Allies failing to understand this Roman attitude and thinking themselves not obligated beyond the letter of a treaty could quickly find themselves the object of unexpected Roman anger.

SLAVES AND FREEDMEN

The existence of slavery was never questioned in antiquity, least of all by the Romans. It seemed to be a logical part of a hierarchical order. Today, any slave system is intolerable. At least the early Roman system avoided some of the worst features of slavery. It was not based on anything like the modern misguided notion of race. The evils of chattel slavery did not arise until later, with the exploitation of masses of slaves in large agricultural or industrial operations. In early Rome, slaves probably were not numerous. Failure to pay off debts was often a cause for enslavement. Women and children captured in war were usually enslaved and put to work.

Slaves in early Rome were valuable, and they constituted an integral part of the family as they worked beside other members of the family at home or in the fields. They could reasonably look forward to at least informal manumission, a grant of freedom, after some years of faithful service. At that time, they became freedmen (liberti, sing. libertus) or freedwomen (libertae, sing. liberta). They could be required by the terms of their manumission to fulfill various obligations to their former masters. Slaves who were freed in formal legal procedures even became Roman citizens.

ROMAN NAMES AND THE GENS

All Roman citizens belonged to a larger, ostensibly genealogical group called a gens (pl. gentes), often translated as “clan.” The name of one’s gens, the nomen gentilicium, [60] was a person’s most important name. It was the second of the three names often borne by a male citizen. The first name (praenomen), was the personal name: oldest sons were named after their fathers. The last, or surname (cognomen), if there was one, indicated the branch of the gens to which one’s male lineage belonged. In some cases a cognomen attached to a family for generations because of a particular physical trait of one individual. For example, Cicero, the famous orator and statesman, was named Marcus Tullius Cicero. Therefore, he belonged to the Ciceronian line of the Tullian gens. A cicer is Latin for “chickpea”: the story is that a distant relative had a cleft on the end of his nose that looked like the legume. To take another example, although we often refer to Julius Caesar, Julius was not his first name. Caesar’s praenomen was Gains; Julius is his clan-name (nomen). His cognomen, Caesar, means “hairy”; given the Roman penchant for mocking the physical appearance of others and given the fact that the family had been called Caesar for generations, we are left to wonder if the men of the family were all, like the most famous Caesar, bald. In other instances, a cognomen only attached to an individual and not to the family as a whole. Originally, Caesar’s eventual rival, Pompey, was named only Gnaeus Pompeius. He later acquired the cognomen Magnus (“the Great”) because of his early military exploits. When a non-Roman or former slave received Roman citizenship, he adopted the gentilicium of the man who sponsored or freed him. Since the nomen gentilicium provided the crucial identification for a Roman, scholarly books or reference works in ancient history will usually list a Roman under his or her gentilicium. In this book, for example, the three aforementioned men are found in the index under “Tullius,” “Julius,” and “Pompeius,” respectively.

Because the male family line was more important than the individual, fathers and sons often bore the same praenomen for generations, or two names might alternate between fathers and sons. If there were more than one son each generation, other sons would be named for other male agnates, such as a father’s brothers. As a result, during the Republic, there were only about sixteen commonly used male first names, which were usually indicated by such easily recognized abbreviations as “L.” for Lucius, “M.” for Marcus, “P.” for Publius, “Q.” for Quintus, and “T.” for Titus. Gaius and Gnaeus are abbreviated “C.” and “Cn.” because “g” and “c” were not distinguished in the earliest Roman alphabet.

Since women in early Rome counted even less as individuals than men, they usually had only one official name throughout the republican period-the female form of the father’s gentilicium. Therefore, Cicero’s daughter was named Tullia and Caesar’s, Julia. If a father raised more than one daughter, their formal names were all the same. Hence, the three infamous sisters of P. Clodius, the even more infamous enemy of Cicero (pp. 270-1), were all named Clodia. They may have been distinguished informally at home as Prima, Secunda, and Tertia (Clodia the First, the Second, and the Third).  Although women did not, as a rule, change their names after they married, they were sometimes referred to with a possessive form of their husbands’ name, often the cognomen if he had one, after her own. Thus, the Clodia who married Q. Caecilius Metellus Celer is known in modem scholarship as Clodia Metelli (Metellus’ Clodia) and her sister who married L. Licinius Lucullus is known as Clodia Luculli. [61]

The origin of the gens

The origin of the gens as a genealogical group is hard to discover. among patterns in the rest of central Italy indicate the existence of similar groups among surrounding peoples. They may have had their roots in warrior bands where loyal followers adopted the name of their leader to promote solidarity. The existence of such bands is indicated -in seventh-century B.C.E. burials where lower status graves a.re grouped a.round the princely graves of some wealthy warriors. The story of Attus Clausus (Atta Claudius, Appius Claudius) and his 4000 dependents receiving citizenship en bloc in the early Republic lends support to this theory. So does the Lapis Satricamus, an inscription from Satricum, south of Rome. It mentions a Publius Valerius, who may have been the leader of a hand of warriors;

During the Monarchy, such warrior bands may have been incorporated into the Roman. arm.y as Rome expanded its territory under the kings. Those men who did not belong to such a band would have been assigned to one or had one created for them. Before the creation of separate rural tribes Rome was divided into four urban, tribes and twenty-six rural districts (pagi) or regions (regiones). The total of tribes and rural territories combined corresponds to the thirty curiae of the early Roman army (p. 50). Probably, each rural district was identified by the name of its biggest gens. Significantly, when the rural districts were initially grouped into fewer, larger tribes, each tribe seems to have taken its name from that of a gens.

Patrician and nonpatrician gentes

In keeping with the Roman passion for hierarchical distinction, at some point before the end of the Monarchy and the beginning of the Republic (ca. 500 B.C.E.), certain gentes seem to have become distinguished as patrician. The members of those gentes, the patricians, had more prestige and privileges than the members of the other gentes. The word patrician (patricius) is derived from the word for father, pater (pl. patres). In archaic Rome, the word patres, “fathers,” also applied to the men who monopolized the important priesthoods, held the office of interrex, and elected kings. Eventually, as a special group within the senate, they claimed the sole right to approve or reject legislation during the early Republic.

Perhaps the original patres were the fathers of the families whose clans headed the early tribes and rural districts that constituted the territory of the. early Roman State. The family cults that they maintained might then have been incorporated into the public cults of the early state and secured for their gentes the privilege of supplying ·public priests. Patricians became further divided into greater and lesser gentes (patres maiorum gentium and patrcs minorum gentium). Perhaps, some patrician gentes were designated as “greater” after giving their names to tribes later consolidated out of the original twenty-six rural districts. Unfortunately, much has to remain in the realm of learned conjecture and speculation.

As a result of later developments, the nonpatrician gentes came to be identified as plebian. For the late Monarchy and the beginning of the Republic, it is best to refer to patricians and nonpatricians. What did not automatically distinguish patricians and [62] nonpatricians was wealth. Many nonpatricians were as wealthy as patricians. The great majority was not. Neither did the distinction have any particular ethnic basis. Both patricians and nonpatricians were a mixture of Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan elements. Nor were all nonpatricians clients of patricians, although many probably were.

As Roman citizens, nonpatricians had the right to make commercial contracts, own real property, contract valid marriages, sue or be sued in court, and vote in the popular assemblies of the early state. They could not hold public priesthoods. A few outstanding non- patricians probably did obtain high office and membership in the senate. Patricians trying to build up networks of useful supporters may have helped them, even to the point of establishing ties of marriage. Over time, however, the patricians tried to assert exclusive rights to political leadership as a privileged noble class in the face of aspiring nonpatricians. Eventually, the citizens as a whole rejected their claims (p. 83ff.)

CLASSES IN ROMAN SOCIETY

There were many other hierarchical distinctions in Roman society. They are very complex. Modern English terms like class, status, and rank often do not have the same meanings as their Latin cognates or analogs. The English word class, for example, comes from the Latin classis, which came to indicate a classification based on wealth. in the Roman census. A male citizen’s classis, or lack of one, in the census, determined the type of military service for which he was liable and the century to which he was assigned in the Centuriate Assembly. The Latin word status was used primarily in Roman law to indicate a person’s legal standing within both the family and the civil community: whether he was free or unfree; a citizen or a noncitizen; an independent head of household (sui iuris) or still under the power of the head of a household (alieni iuris). In modern English usage, “status” is closely linked to the concept of classes horizontally conceived socioeconomic groups ranging from lower to higher, who each have some sense of common life experience and shared political interest.

Some would say that such a concept is problematical in dealing with Roman society. It tended to be vertically organized in the hereditary hierarchical relationships of the family, gens, tribe, and community. Vertical, hierarchical relationships cue across all horizontal generational and economic divisions in the performance of common cultic and civic duties. Nevertheless, the Romans did have a word indicating a citizen socia1 and political rank. It is the word ordo, order (as in the English expression “the lower orders of society”). It can also be translated as rank or class in the sense of a broad horizontally conceived social group within which members have a certain self-conscious identity. Hence, in the field of Roman history, the. English phrase Struggle (Conflict) of the Orders signifies a conflict that the ancient sources depict between two simplistically conceived classes in the early Republic — the rich patricians and the poor plebeians.

The problem is that the sources were projecting back onto the early Republic the kind of more clearly defined orders that existed in the later Republic. At least at the beginning of the Republic, the patrician gentes probably had not yet claimed to be an exclusive governing elite. The plebeians, the plebs, consisted of many nonpatricians of various socioeconomic levels from the general mass of citizens (probably the original [63] meaning of plebs), who came to feel politically, socially, and/ or economically disadvantaged and banded together to develop their own “plebeian” institutions and officials and press for the redress of their grievances.

THE OPENNESS OF EARLY ROMAN
SOCIETY TO OUTSIDERS

Despite their penchant for creating hierarchical distinctions, the early Romans, unlike their Greek contemporaries, were remarkably willing to incorporate outsiders as citizens of their community. As Rome’s power expanded throughout its history, the Romans came into contact with increasingly different peoples and their diverse cultures. Since the Romans did not subscribe to modern ideas of race, they tended to treat individuals of different national and ethnic origins, even people of color, as they would anyone else of the same social status.

That is not to say Romans were not prejudiced against people they perceived as different. They were just as guilty as anyone else of xenophobia, negative ethnic stereotyping, and cultural intolerance. On the other hand, when non-Romans acquired Roman culture in terms of language, dress, manners, and education, often through years of faithful service as allies, subjects, soldiers, or slaves, they could become fully integrated into Roman society as Roman citizens.

Rome’s origin as a community created from several neighboring villages and as a cosmopolitan center of trade among Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Latins, and other Italic peoples is significant. It probably explains why the Romans, unlike the citizens of Greek poleis, did not look upon themselves as a community of kin and were able to be more inclusive than their Greek counterparts. As Rome expanded by treaty and conquest during the Monarchy and early Republic, it incorporated people from added territories into the citizen community. At the same time, the new citizens’ gods were incorporated into the divine community, whose public cults constituted the state religion. By the end of the Monarchy, Rome had grown from a few square miles of territory within the radius of the Forum to about 300 square miles embracing the northwestern third of Latium. The constant incorporation of new citizens enabled the Roman army to keep pace with and fuel even more expansion. Taking over the cults and deities of newly incorporated citizens gave Romans the self-assured feeling of divine favor toward their actions. It also lessened the alienation of those who had been forced to join them.

EARLY ROMAN RELIGION

Rome could easily assimilate other people’s gods because Roman religion was not based on any creed or dogma. We are familiar with religions that have a set of beliefs that lie at their core; this is termed orthodoxy. For the Romans, however, it was not belief that pleased the gods, but the proper forms of worship (called “orthopraxy”) that ensured success in daily life. Religion played a central role in private and public life. A multiplicity of gods occupied a hierarchical position of superiority above both human beings :ind the state. It was the duty of the individual, the family, and the state [64] to perform the sacrifices and rituals that the gods required. Thus everyone would prosper. Anybody’s gods could be enlisted in the effort: Roman religion was· a polytheistic system that allowed for the admission of new gods who. had proven themselves to be powerful. One result of this openness is that it is nearly impossible to recover an orI. original Roman religion that is free from the influences of outside peoples, including not only the Greeks and the Etruscans but also Rome’s Latin neighbors.

What we can recover of Roman religion in the earliest period suggests it reflected a life centered on home, farm, and  pasture. Household rituals centered around the family hearth, where the goddess Vesta was worshiped and which was festooned with garlands on certain festival days. Rituals were observed to ensure the health of the family, their flocks, and their crops. Other observances that seem to date to a very early time in Roman history appear to address more communal concerns, such as the festival of the Lupercalia in February during which semi-naked men ran a circuit through the city that might reflect an early boundary line. The focus of most religious activity was the maintenance of the Romans’ relationship with the gods, to which they gave the name of pax deorum (literally, the peace of the gods).

Communicating with the gods

The Romans believed that they could communicate with the gods and that their gods could communicate with them. There is no reason to think that the ancient Romans had anything like a modern prayer book, but it is clear from their literature that they often prayed to the gods. Numerous dedications written on stone record the presentation of gifts at temples as thanks-offerings for help received or as requests for help in the future. The Romans could also communicate with their gods through sacrifice, the offering of vegetable produce or animal victims at an altar. The gods received a portion of the offering as a sign of honor intended to make them well-disposed to hearing their worshipers’ request. Humans ate the rest at a meal after the ritual was over.

The gods communicated with the Romans in a number of ways. On rare occasions, sometimes commemorated in inscriptions carved in stone, gods appeared to individuals through dreams or waking visions. Sometimes the gods spoke through oracles, temples where a priest would reveal the god’s answer to questions put to him. More commonly however the gods made their opinions know through divine signs called ally took the form of events that violated the regular, natural order of things, such as a statue that sweated blood, a newborn baby shouting “Victory!”, or two suns appearing the sky at once. Some normal celestial phenomena like lightning strikes, peals of thunder, and comets were thought to be divine signs as well (see the inset on p. 29). The gods also spoke to their worshipers through the flight and cry of certain types of birds and through the entrails of sacrificed animals, which would be inspected by trained officials before the meat was roasted. If, for example, the animal’s liver was misshapen, dire events were about to unfold (see p. 69). When any of these signs were observed, the Romans quickly enacted whatever they determined was needed to restore balance in the pax deorum. [65]

Gods and festivals of the house and fields

The spirits of the house were few. There was Janus, who was associated with the household’s front door. He faced both in and out, letting in friends and shutting out enemies. At weddings, it was the custom for the bride to smear Janus’ doorposts with wolf’s fat and to be lifted over his threshold. At the birth of a child, the threshold was struck with an ax, a pestle, and a broom to repulse wild spirits from the outside. When someone died in the house, the corpse was carried out feet first, perhaps for fear that the ghost might find its way back in.

Inside the house was Vesta, linked to the family hearth whose fire gave warmth and cooked the daily meals. It is said that no image or statue of her was made in early times. Yet, she was the center of family life and worship. To her, the head of the house presented his bride or newborn child. Before her hearth stood the dining table, also a sacred object. On it was the salt dish and the sacred cake of salted grain baked by the women of the house. At dinner, the head of the family ceremoniously threw part of the cake into the fire. As Janus began the roll of deities invoked in family prayer, so Vesta ended it.

Not far from the fireplace was the pantry. Here dwelt a vague group of nameless deities collectively known as the Penates. With Vesta, they shared the offerings made at the fireplace because they guarded the food that Vesta cooked. In Latin literature, they were a synonym for home. So were the Lares, a group of deities whose origin is obscure. They were associated with both the home and the compitum a place where roads cross. Each home and crossroads had a shrine for its Lares. The crossroads Lares were celebrated each autumn at the festival of the Compitalia. In honor of this holiday, plows were hung up as a sign that the season’s work was done. Everybody, even slaves, joined in the feasting and fun.

The festival of the Ambarvalia was held toward the end of May. It secured divine favor for the growing and ripening crops. The farmer and his family, dressed in white with olive wreaths around their heads, solemnly drove a pig, a sheep, and a bull three times around the farm. The three animals were then killed in a sacrifice called the suovetauralia, a name that included the words for the three animals. The victims were opened, examined for omens, and burned upon the altar fire. Then followed a long prayer asking for good weather and good crops from Mars, originally a god of agriculture.

Other spring festivals were the Liberalia, for Liber (god of wine); the Cerialia, for Ceres (goddess of grain); and the Robigalia. At the Robigalia, a red dog was sacrificed to avert Robigus, the red mildew, or “rust,” that attacked wheat. Shepherds had their spring festivals, too. The Parilia was the feast of Pales, spirit of flocks and herds. It took place on April 21, just before the annual trek to summer pastures. At dawn, the herdsmen sprinkled the animals with water, swept out the stalls, and decorated the barns with green branches. Then they lit a bonfire of straw, brush, and other items, through which the flocks were driven and the shepherds leaped. After an offering of milk and cakes to Pales and a prayer for the health, safety, and increase of the flocks, the shepherds spent the rest of the day in sports, eating, and drinking. Later, the day of this festival was accepted as the anniversary of Rome’s founding, because the young Romulus, [66] the legendary founder, had been depicted as a shepherd.

Two noteworthy festivals held in late summer or early fall are coupled with the names of Jupiter and Mars. The first was a wine festival, the Vinalia Rustica . It was held on August 19 in honor of Jupiter. After the sacrifice of a ewe lamb, Jupiter’s high priest solemnly inaugurated the grape-picking season by cutting the first bunch of grapes. The other was the festival of the October Horse, when a chariot race was held to honor Mars. The right-hand horse of the winning team and a spear were sacrificed to Mars. The horse’s tail, a phallic symbol, was rushed over to the King’s House ( Regia ). There, its still-warm blood dribbled upon the hearth. That was the seat of vitality in the house. The strength and virility of the horse were thus transferred to it. The horse’s head, cut off and decked with cakes, was fought over by the men of two adjacent wards in Rome. The winners were allowed to display it as a trophy.

Early outside influence

Rome’s early interaction with other peoples in the Italian peninsula extended to religious matters as well as political and commercial concerns. The Etruscan goddesses Uni and Menrva and the Italic Juno and Menerva (the Roman Minerva) came to be identified with the Greek goddesses Hera and Athena.  The Etruscan Tinia andItalic Jupiter took on some of the features of Zeus.  A great temple to the triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva was built on the Capitoline Hill at the end of the Monarchy and the beginning of the Republic. It was designed and decorated in a style that incorporated many elements from contemporary Greek temples. Similar temples were appearing in contemporary Etruscan and Latin cities.

Jupiter and Mars

Jupiter (Iuppiter, Deus Pater) was Rome’s supreme civic god. The first part of his name is etymologically the same as Zeus, his Greek counterpart. Each is associated with the sky, thunder, lightning, and rain. With the growth of political and urban life among the Latins and the Romans, Jupiter became the symbol of the Roman State, the giver of victory, and the spirit of law and justice. Rome similarly exalted Mars (Mavors, Mamars), who gave his name to the first month, Martius (March), of the early Roman calendar. Once an Italic protector of the farmer’s fields and herds or the community’s boundaries, Mars became the defender of the Roman State against its enemies .

Juno and Minerva

One of the most prominent cults in early Italy, not just in Rome, was that of Juno. She was worshiped particularly in Latium and southern Etruria. At Rome, there were many different temples for Juno in her various guises: Juno Regina, Juno Sospita, Juno Lucina, to name a few. On a few occasions in the historical period, the Romans managed to defeat their enemies in part by persuading an opponent’s Juno to abandon her people and come to Rome. The Roman goddess Minerva is closely linked with the [67] cult of Menerva in Falerii, a semi-Etruscan Faliscan town north of Rome, west of the Tiber. She may have been introduced by immigrant Faliscans skilled in the pottery and met:il trades. Her early presence in Rome is clearly in line with the archaeological evidence of close commercial and industrial ties between Rome and south Etruria.

Other cults

The expansion of early Roman commercial contacts is likewise emphasized by the erection in the Cattle Market (Forum Boarium) of an altar to Hercules (the Phoenician Melqart; the Greek Herakles), the patron god of traders and merchants. The worship of Diana (identified with the Greek Artemis) was transferred from Aricia, where she was worshiped by the Romans and many other Latin towns, to the Aventine Hill-a sign of Roman dominance over their neighbors. Other goddesses also migrated to Rome. Fortuna was imported from Antium (Anzio). Venus was formerly worshiped as a goddess of gardens and orchards at Ardea. She became identified later with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty.

Of the deities just named, all, except Hercules, were indigenous to Italy, yet all of them were subject to the influence of the religious traditions of other people. Even Ceres, an ancient Italic goddess associated with agricultural fertility, did not escape the effects of this transforming influence. When a famine struck ca. 496 B.C.E., the Romans sought divine help. They vowed to build a temple on the Aventine, overlooking the grain market of the Forum Boarium. Three years later it was dedicated to Ceres, Libera, and Liber. They represented a triad of agricultural deities associated with grain and wine. They were identical in almost everything but name with the Greek triad of Demeter, Persephone, and Iacchus. Moreover, Greek artists decorated the temple with paintings.

In 492 B.C.E., Mercury also received a temple on the Aventine. Like both Hermes, to whom he was assimilated, and Herakles (the Greek name for Hercules), he was a god of traders and seems particularly connected with grain merchants from both Etruria and Greek cities in southern Italy. Seaborne imports from southern Italy seem to account for an early connection between Poseidon, the Greek god of the great open sea, and ltalic Neptune. Neptune quickly received the trident and sea horses of Poseidon and all of the mythology associated with him.

Not long after 500 B.C.E., the worship of Apollo, the god of healing and prophecy, came from Cumae, the nearest and oldest Greek settlement on the Italian mainland. Despite his unlatinized name, Apollo became in later times one of the greatest gods of the Roman pantheon. Cumae was also the home of the Sibyl, Apollo’s inspired priestess. Her oracle must have been known in early Rome. The earliest oracles in the Sibylline Books seem to have been made around 500 B.C.E., at the beginning of the Republic. These books were kept in the temple of Jupiter during the Republic and could be consulted only by a special college of two priests. They played a decisive role throughout the Republic in deciding which foreign gods could come to Rome. They also introduced new forms of worship, such as lectisternia (sing. lectisternium), ritual banquets for the gods. Statues of the gods in male/female pairs were publicly displayed reclining on couches before tables of food and drink. [68]

Divination

Like other ancient peoples, the Romans believed in divination, that is, reading signs in order to predict the future and determine the will of the gods. That consists of interpreting sacred signs, such as thunder, lightning, the flights of birds, and the entrails of sacrificial animals to discern the will and intentions of the gods. In particular, hepatoscopy — inspecting the size, shape, texture, and color of a sacrificed animal’s liver — was highly regarded. The neighboring Etruscans were so devoted to the practice of divination that the Romans called it the Disciplina Etrusca, the Etruscan Learning (p. 29). Roman aristocrats, whose families provided the public priests, often sent their sons to Etruscan cities to learn this valuable lore. The Etruscan priests who interpreted these signs were called haruspices. On critical occasions, the Romans would summon haruspices from Etruria for extra assurance that they understood the divine will.

Two important branches of divination were the taking of auspices (auspicia) and the conducting of auguries (auguria). Taking auspices involved ceremonies of divination or for the purpose of determining if the time was right for a particular private or public action. The person taking the auspices looked for special signs in the flight and behavior of birds, the unusual behavior of animals, and heavenly phenomena like thunder and lightning. The same signs were sought in conducting auguries. The auguries determined if the gods were favorable to an action, to a place where an action was to occur, or to the person about to undertake it. Any man could take auspices, but only special priests called augurs could perform auguries (p. 83). Although, as was mentioned above (p. 65), the Romans sometimes received messages directly from their gods through dreams waking visions, and oracles, they were less enamored of this type of divination (called natural divination) than were the Greeks and some other peoples of the ancient Mediterranean.

THE STATE, RELIGION, AND WAR

The emerging Roman State embraced and incorporated all the older and smaller social and religious communities such as the family, the gens, and the tribe. According to legend, Romulus had inaugurated the Roman State with religious ceremonies when he established the original pomerium. As the city grew and expanded, it was the responsibility of the state to extend the pomerium and provide for the common religious life of the community. Much of that came to be related to war.

Janus became the guardian of Rome’s Sacred Gateway at the northeast corner of the Forum. Its doors were shut only in peacetime, probably because the early armies marched through this gate on their way to war. The sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta guaranteed the secure existence of the state. After her hearth was cleaned, it was relit on March 1. That was early Rome’s New Year, the first day of the month named for Mars, the god of war. His altar in the Campus Martius was the symbol of the city’s military power. When Roman armies returned in triumph, victorious generals Jed their triumphal processions up to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. [69]

The king and early priesthoods

The priestly role of the king first as head of state and then as rex sacrorum has been described in the previous chapter (pp. 48-9). The Vestal Virgins may have originated as the king’s wife and daughters tending his sacred household hearth. Significantly, the later Temple of Vesta and its sacred public hearth were built over part of the Regia, the old royal palace.

Eventually, the number of Vestal Virgins became fixed at six. They were usually chosen between the ages of six and ten from senatorial families. They were required to serve a minimum of thirty years. After that, they could retire and even marry, although our sources tell us that few did. Their chief duties were to keep the sacred fire ofVesta’s hearth burning to ensure the permanence of Rome and to prepare many items necessary for ritual observances throughout the year. They prepared the mix of salt and grain used in all public sacrifices. Any hint of a Vestal’s sexual impurity caused great public concern for the welfare of the state. Those convicted of sexual impropriety were sentenced to death by being entombed alive.

Other important early priests and priestesses were the flamen Dialis or chief priest of Jupiter and his wife (the flaminica Dialis). There were two other major flamens (flamines), one for Mars and one for Quirinus, a very obscure deity associated with the origins of Rome who came to be known as the deified Romulus. Not much is known about these two flamens except that they and the flamen Dialis always had to be patricians even after others did not. The flamen of Mars obviously was associated with the rituals of war, and he officiated at the festival of the October Horse (p. 67). Twelve minor flamens each served a deity characteristic of a largely agrarian people-Ceres, Flora, and Pomona, for example, who respectively represented grain, flowering plants, and fruit trees.

Some other early priests were the three augurs, official diviners who interpreted signs from the gods, and three pontiffs, who seem to have acquired a general function as keepers of civil and religious records. Two priesthoods that also seem to have originated in the early Monarchy were related to war: the fetial priests (fetiales) were responsible for declaring war; the Salii performed war dances associated with Mars (p. 83).

THE VALUES OF EARLY ROMAN SOCIETY

The early Romans developed a deeply held set of values that explain much of their behavior. These values resonate in the moral vocabulary of modern Western nations. For example, the English words virtue, prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, piety, fidelity, chastity, constancy, and perseverance stem from Latin roots. Many of the corresponding Latin concepts are important to the public and family life of the early Roman community. They became enshrined in what came to be called the mos maiorum, custom of the ancestors. Later Classical Roman writers are now the major sources for these concepts. In attempting to reform the behavior of their contemporaries, Roman writers frequently pointed out how much the heroes and deeds of the past exemplified the values they idealized. They could do so, however, only because those values were already part of the cultural heritage that their contemporaries shared with the past. [70]

Virtue (Virtus)

The Latin word virtus had a meaning somewhat different from that of its English derivative, virtue. The Latin root of virtus is vir, a man. Virtus signified the particular qualities associated with manliness. A man needed a strong body to support and protect his family and fight for the community. The need for every able-bodied armed man to fight in the army produced a warrior ethos that made military valor particularly salient in the Roman concept of virtue. The upper-class magistrates of the early Republic were primarily military officers who had to show bravery and leadership in battle. The welfare of the community depended upon ordinary citizens in the army. Every soldier had to execute commands obediently in coordination with his comrades to ensure the protection of all. He had to exercise great self-discipline in the heat of battle so as not to break ranks and deny the man on his left the protection of his shield. The idea that a good man subordinated his own narrow interest to those of his family, his comrades, and the state underlies four qualities that became particularly associated with Roman virtue in general: piety, faith, gravity, and constancy.

Dutifulness (pietas)

Dutifulness (pietas) implied in the first place devotion to duty within the family group. It encompassed both a willing acceptance of parental authority and a concern for children. It further meant reverence for and devotion to the gods through action in the exact performance of all required religious rites and ceremonies. Piety toward the state connoted obedience to the laws; dutiful performance of civic duties in a manner consistent with justice, law, and established custom; and patriotic military service.

Faith (fides)

Fides meant “faith” in the sense of “trust.” It was faithfulness in the performance of one’s duties and obligations. It meant being true to one’s word, paying one’s debts, keeping sworn oaths, and performing obligations assumed.by agreement with both gods :ind men. Based on religion and law, it was the foundation of religious, public, and private life. Violation of fides was an offense against both the gods and the community. A patron who broke faith with his client by abuse of his power was placed under a curse. A magistrate who broke faith by acts of injustice and oppression against the people gave the latter the right to rebel. Faith rooted in the social conscience was stronger than written law or statute as a force for holding all parts of the society together in a common relationship. Failure to uphold religious obligations would incur divine wrath.

Gravity (gravitas) and constancy (constantia)

Faith had to be supplemented by two other Roman virtues: gravity and constancy. The first meant absolute self-control-a dignified, serious, and unperturbed attitude toward both good and bad fortune. To cite some early extreme examples, no Roman [71] was supposed to dance in public, nor were husbands and wives supposed to kiss each other outside of their own homes. The second virtue was constancy or perseverance, even under the most trying circumstances, in doing what seemed necessary and right until success was won.

Dignitas, auctoritas, and gloria

Those who exhibited the four qualities discussed above, especially in public life, acquired what ca.me to be called dignitas, (reputation for worth, honor, esteem) and auctoritas (prestige, respect). Particularly outstanding public or military achievements also earned glory (gloria) –praise and public adulation. Roman aristocrats highly valued dignitas, auctoritas, and gloria. They confirmed the leading role of their families in society. Individual leaders demonstrated virtue by successfully defending the community or increasing its resources through warfare and by duly performing their duties as patrons, priests, magistrates, and senators. Thus they acquired the honor, prestige and glory that set them apart from others and gave them the power to continue to lead. That power further enhanced their status and that of their families in competition with their aristocratic peers.

Modesty (pudicitia) and chastity (castitas)

The virtues expected of Roman women were less public than those expected of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. Wives and daughters were expected to exhibit pudicitia (modesty) by dressing appropriately and tending the home. Ancient writers sometimes criticize women who dressed too stylishly or who danced too well. Young women were expected to maintain their virginal chastity (castitas) until they were married. Matronal chastity was highly prized, as is exemplified by the fact that certain religious honors were only available to women who had married once. The quintessential matronal virtues are summed up by an epitaph from the period of the Republic, now lost, for a woman named Claudia: she is praised for her beauty, her modest manner and pleasant conversation, her love for bet husband, and the fact that she bore two children. The epitaph concludes with the statement, “She kept her house. She spun wool.”

Shame (pudor) and disgrace (infamia, ignominia)

Failure to live up to the Roman moral code brought public disgrace (infamia, ignominia) and a feeling of shame (pudor) to both men and women. To avoid such shame was as important to a Roman :is it was to display the virtues Roman society prized. For the Romans as a whole, with their warrior ethos, to conquer was the greatest glory for men; to be conquered, the greatest disgrace. For worn.en, the greatest glory was to be recognized by the community for outstanding pudicitia; it was disgraceful for a woman’s castitas to be questioned. It is worth noting that some of the virtues we extol today (generosity, kindness, fair-mindedness, religious piety and so on), while still valued by the Romans, were not so highly prized by them. [72]

OVERVIEW AND SIGNIFICANCE

Rome’s characteristic hierarchical social structure, centered on the authoritarian, patriarchal family and dominated by an aristocratic elite, had  already taken shape. It also appears that the complex religious amalgam of reverence for ancestors and worship of multiple gods who could communicate with mortals — and the various rituals associated with this worship — had  assumed  the basic form it would continue  to  have well into the future. Along with  these  developments  and growing  out  of them  evolved  the system of values that defined the Romans’ view of themselves as individuals and as a people and made the winning of military glory a paramount ambition of public life..

Ultimately, Roman family life, religion, and morality fostered a conservative type of human being. The authoritarian , patriarchal family and the attitude of dependency inherent in clientage produced an obedience to authority that greatly benefited the aristocratic gentes who controlled the state. The reverence for ancestors and their customs, as enshrined in the words mos maiorum, worked against attempts at radical innovation among all classes, as did the sobriety and piety of the Roman ethical tradition. The resultant abhorrence of innovation is signified by the Roman term for revolution, res novae (new things). So concerned were the Romans to maintain their traditions that many archaic and obsolete practices, institutions, festivals, and offices continued to exist long after they had lost their original function. When innovations were made, the Romans were careful to cast them as preserving ancient custom, no matter how dubious the claim.  For example, in religion, the ancient Sibylline Books, with their convenient ambiguities and even opportune forgeries, could justify the introduction of new deities and rituals from time to time. Even in politics, in a society where the vagaries of oral tradition often predominated over written records, “ancestral precedents” might be of as recent origin as an orator’s latest speech. Therefore, Roman conservatism was saved from being stultifying. Change could occur while a deep sense of continuity — one of Rome’s greatest strengths — prevailed.

SUGGESTED READING

Forsythe, G. A. A Critical History of Early Ro me: From Prehistory to the First Punic War.

Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005 .

MacMullen, R . The Earliest Romans: A Character Sketch. Ann Arbor: University  of Michigan Press, 2011.

Smith, C. J. The Roman Clan: The Gens from Ancient Ideology to Modern Anthropology Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2006. [73]

8

Donna Zuckerberg’s editorial “Welcome to the New Eidolon” and LKM Maisal’s “Women are Made, But from What?”

1. Welcome to the New Eidolon!

Today, as the moon temporarily blots out the sun, marks the beginning of Eidolon’s second chapter. On the surface, things may look pretty much the same: we’re still on Medium, although we’ve updated our logos and branding. The editorial team is the same, and we’re going to have roughly the same publishing schedule. But we’ve made a few subtle changes that we hope will have significant ramifications, and I’m excited to tell you about them.

First, we’ve completely rewritten our mission statement to reflect how we feel Eidolon’s mission has changed since we first launched. When I drafted Eidolon’s first mission statement, my goal was to create a space for informal, personal essays about the intersections of the ancient and modern world, aimed at a general audience. That vision is still at the core of Eidolon. But when we thought back on our most successful and impactful articles, we realized that the pieces we’re proudest of have tended to be those where the writers try to define the complicated and problematic role of the classicist in twenty-first century society. Where does Classics (and the professional study of Classics) fit into contemporary culture? How can we, as a discipline, do better? Be better? What is our ethical place in this world?

These are thorny, difficult questions, and we look forward to providing a platform where writers and readers can continue to tangle with them. As the editorial team discussed how to facilitate those discussions, however, it became increasingly clear to us that “a modern way to write about the ancient world” no longer suffices as a description for what Eidolon does and can do. And I couldn’t be happier about that.

Part of our revamped mission is an open confirmation of something that will already have been obvious to regular readers: Eidolon is now a space for unapologetic progressive and inclusive approaches to Classics. Our goal is to model a Classics that is ethical, diverse, intersectional, and especially feminist. Before I explain what that means, I want to confront what it absolutely does not mean: rebranding as an explicitly feminist publication does not mean that Eidolon will now only publish content about gender, abortion, and lipstick in the ancient world. Not everything we publish will be, specifically, about feminism.

Several people have expressed concerns to me that being explicit about Eidolon’s feminist politics will lead to a narrowing of our content. I don’t believe that it will, unless potential writers and readers choose to understand what “feminism” means in extremely bad faith. Progressive feminism is a capacious enough category that it can include content about reproductive rights and fashion but also philology and military history and textual criticism and many, many other topics.

What does it mean to me that Eidolon is a progressive, feminist publication with a commitment to social justice? If you’re thinking, “Is Eidolon still for me even though I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a feminist because [insert reason here],” I believe that it is. You may not like some of our articles, but that was probably true already. All that this change means is that this is not the place for you to elaborate on whatever goes inside those [insert reason here] square brackets. There are plenty of venues where it might be appropriate to explain why you don’t personally feel that feminism is for you, but Eidolon’s articles and comment sections aren’t those venues. This is not a forum to debate the merits of feminism (although we welcome feminist critique of contemporary feminism!), anti-racism, or diversity in Classics. If you feel the need to expound on your opinion that progressivism is politically correct virtue-signaling SJW bullshit, then maybe the journal isn’t for you after all.

Will this shift lead to a less diverse Eidolon? Our writers always have been, and will continue to be, a diverse group. Our writer pool has excellent diversity of race, age, gender, professional status, and sexuality. We work hard to keep it that way. But we’ve been accused of not being “ideologically diverse.” This charge is a common one, but I think it is misguided, in addition to being morally bankrupt. Making ideological diversity a primary objective is fundamentally incompatible with fighting against racism, sexism, and other forms of structural oppression, and we choose to prioritize the latter.

Everyone may deserve a platform, but not everyone deserves a place on this platform. If a group of conservative classicists would like to start their own online journal championing the merits of a traditionalist approach to Classics, then I salute them. I’d even be interested in collaborating with them.

But Eidolon isn’t going to publish articles arguing that identity politics are ruining Classics. I don’t feel any obligation to represent that view here. I don’t believe that political neutrality is either achievable or desirable. Classics as a discipline has deep roots in fascism and reactionary politics and white supremacy, and those ideologies exert a powerful gravitational pull on the discipline’s practitioners. If we want to fight those forces, we need to actively work against them.

We hope that Eidolon will be a platform for energetic, thoughtful discussion about how best to achieve these goals, both in our articles and in the comments sections on Medium and Facebook. But we’ve come to realize that, if we want that kind of discussion, we’re going to need a new commenting policy. Unfortunately, when you allow open comment sections on the internet, truly lively and respectful discourse becomes impossible. A few condescending, trolling comments can have a profoundly chilling effect on the conversation.

In the past we only deleted comments that were openly bigoted or hateful. But from now on, we’ll be monitoring and moderating comments on Medium and Facebook much more heavily. You can read our new guidelines here. We hope that they will lead to a comment section where academics and interested non-specialists can add thoughtful contributions that build on our articles and address important topics with sensitivity and nuance — a comment section that could really form the basis of a community of people who care about making Classics better.

If you appreciate Eidolon, we hope that you’ll continue to support us by reading our articles, commenting, and sending pitches — and maybe also by supporting us in a more concrete manner. Now that Eidolon is independent, we will rely on reader support to pay our writers and hardworking editors. We’ll be launching a Patreon account soon to provide extra content to patrons, and before the holidays we plan to open an online store selling merchandise featuring our beautiful original art.

I’m so excited for this next chapter, and I think the changes we’re making around here will help Eidolon continue to push the discipline forward. I hope you’ll come with us for the journey!

Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in Jezebel, The Establishment, and Avidly. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is under contract with Harvard University Press.

2. Women Are Made, But From What?

Long before people on the internet began making bad jokes about “identifying as an attack helicopter,” people were already poking fun at arbitrary genders — but that word did not quite have the same meaning as it does today:

A grammarian’s daughter had sex and gave birth
To a child that was masculine, feminine, neuter.
—Anth. Gr. 9.489

This epigram by the Alexandrian Palladas (c. 400), himself a disgruntled grammarian, isn’t one of the highlights of ancient humor. But unlike many other equally contrived scenarios and gimmicky jokes in the books of the GreekAnthology, this poem is as relatable to its readers today as ever. Anyone who can read it in the original Greek, at least, will have learned the language by repeating the same words in all three grammatical genders over and over:

agathos, agathê, agathon
kakos, kakê, kakon …

Although the distinction was not maintained in everyday English, strictly speaking, people used to have a sex, and words had a gender. So in Ancient Greek, thugateres, “daughters,” were feminine in both sex and gender, while “children” of any sex were, by the rules of Ancient Greek grammar, paidia of neuter gender.

Only in the 1960s was the word adopted in a new sense by feminists in order to do justice to a similar mismatch in society — namely, that not all who are female in sex are naturally inclined to act in a “feminine” manner. Instead, it was argued, many are forced into such a role through societal pressure, under the threat of drastic consequences. In Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s phrasing (roughly), women are made, not born. In patriarchal society, women’s social gender is not an expression of their natural inclinations, but an imposition based on their biological sex.

The sex/gender distinction has since become commonplace in the Humanities, and so Classical texts are now regularly analyzed in terms of how they construct gender, and to what purpose. Where 19th-century philologists had been bitterly opposed, for example, to the discovery of Sappho as a woman-loving woman (a stain upon her honor!), studies like Michel Foucault’s monumental History of Sexuality have made it fashionable to investigate the malleability of sexual norms. Few collected volumes can scrape by without a chapter or section on gender nowadays, and the question of how ancient categorization schemes deviate from modern heteronormative expectations in particular has continuously generated new scholarship.

Yet even in a recent anthology called TransAntiquity: Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World, almost all the contributions in fact concern cross-dressing: they overwhelmingly frame the materials they discuss in terms of someone with a stable sex performing — often only temporarily — as the other gender. “The concept ‘transgender’ is a modern category,” explains Filippo Carlà-Uhink. No wonder that, being trans myself, I feel alienated from the whole endeavor of “Classics and Gender.” Surely nobody has ever suggested that there were no men in antiquity because modern conceptions of “man” differ from ancient ones? For all the talk of queering and subversion of binary gender, I am nevertheless left to wonder why Classicists on the whole find transgender people like me literally unimaginable.

If you’re agnostic about whether it makes sense to bring transgender issues into antiquity, you need look no further than Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans. One of the dialogues, ostensibly about a masculine-looking woman-loving (hetairistria) woman, encapsulates the topic almost perfectly. In it, Leaina tells her friend about a sexual encounter with Demonassa and “Megilla.” The latter, once they are in private, takes off a wig to reveal a masculine haircut and explains: “You must understand my name is Megillos. Demonassa is my wife.”

Here we see a person who performs and is seen as a woman in public, but privately prefers a less feminine look, calls himself a man, and uses a man’s name as well as masculine grammatical gender. In A.L.H.’s translation (lightly adapted):

‘Can it be, Megillos, that you are a man and lived among us under the disguise of a woman, just like Achilles, who stayed among the girls hidden by his purple robe? And is it true that you possess that male organ, and that you do to Demonassa what any husband does to his wife?’

‘That Leaina,’ she replied, ‘I do not have. […] Yet I am all man. […] I was born the same as all the rest of you women, but I have the tastes and desires of a man.’

It’s really all there: Megillos was Assigned Female At Birth (AFAB) but occupies a male social role in his relationships, emphatically claiming to be “all man” and unwilling to be “effeminated”— misgendered, as we might say today. By any modern definition, this fictional character is a trans man.

Now, of course there are problems with using a modern definition to talk about the distant past in the first place. But as Gabrielle Bychowski argues, not all definitions “require a significant degree of penetration into a person’s internal life.” If all we mean by “trans” is that Megillos does not identify as his assigned sex, what harm is there in describing him as trans? It certainly seems more true to the character than to privilege Leaina’s (equally fictional) interpretation over his own and treat him as a same-sex attracted woman, as multiple books about homosexuality in antiquity do as a matter of course.

If Classicists cannot even imagine a fictional character being transgender, what chance do I have? This character has no existence outside of a text that makes it clear he uses a female name and pronouns only when he has to, and yet the best scholars seem to be able to do is to treat both of his names — his deadname and the one he chose himself — as equally valid, if they use the masculine at all. Carlà-Uhink typifies this attitude even while arguing that this is “the one case of people adopting a gender different from their sex at birth in their private lives”:

Megilla removes what happens to be a wig, shows her shaved head, and explains to a baffled Leaena that she is not a man, since she does not have male genitals. —TransAntiquity, p. 14

I don’t think this is a willful misreading, but a misreading it certainly is: while it’s true that he uses the feminine form of “the same” (homoia) to describe what he was born as, he insists he is a man regardless of his body being like a woman’s. And that is ultimately all there is to the way bodies are gendered: they are alike, they share certain similarities, but there is no one set of criteria that makes them definitely one thing or the other. Not all modern-day trans people, even if they take hormones or undergo other operations, seek out Genital Reconstruction Surgery (GRS) or even desire it.

‘Let me have my own way with you, Leaina, if you don’t believe me,’ [Megillos] answered, ‘and you will soon see that I have nothing to envy men for. I have something else to serve like a man’s organ. Come on, let me do what I want to do and you will soon understand.’

The reason for this inability to see a trans man as a man, rather than a butch woman, seems to lie in the overwhelming rhetorical power of the sex/gender distinction. Whereas sex is supposed to be fixed, gender is not even skin deep, being only a “performance.” But this really seems to be a projection onto ancient texts of a Beauvoirian view of how women are made. It is rather reminiscent of the case of Count Sándor Vay, a 19th-century Hungarian writer who lived as a heterosexual man throughout his life, but became the basis of much later thinking about lesbianism — including in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

In a certain kind of feminist thinking, it seems that if women are made, they are made out of babies that, struggle as they might, can only ever be made into women. In its origin, this inflexible view might be no more than an unintended glitch of an early feminist theory of gender. But Trans-Exclusionary “Radical Feminists” (TERFs) still use it today to spread a false sense that gender transition threatens to undermine gay rights — and are happy to ally with far-right conservatives when it comes to attacking trans people. That is why a passage like the following is not innocent:

Male authors from the Hellenistic […] through the Roman periods […] for the most part take an extremely hostile view of female homoeroticism as the worst perversion of natural order. Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe […] treats sympathetically a girl’s attraction to another girl, but denies the possibility of a true lesbian relationship by transforming one of the girls into a boy at the end.
— Thomas K. Hubbard, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, p. 17

In Ovid’s telling, Iphis again is a girl only in the sense of sex. His mother Telethusa, warned by her husband that they cannot afford raising a girl, decides to give him the gender-neutral name “Iphis” and raises him as a boy. It is as a boy that he meets and falls in love with Ianthe, and their relatives arrange for them to marry as a man and a woman. His despondency in anticipation of the wedding is not, I would argue, about the incompatibility of “her” same-sex desire and Ianthe’s expectation of a male spouse, but instead (or at least with equal plausibility) comes out of his dysphoria about having a body sexed or gendered as female: “what I want, … she wants,” Iphis laments, “but nature does not.”

However distasteful the ancient heteronormative order may be, it is not just for Ovid’s narratorial voice, but also for the fictional character himself that the problem is solved satisfactorily when the goddess Isis transforms Iphis into a “real” man. It feels to me like you have to see transition as at least a little bit of a “perversion of natural order” to insist that the proper ending of the story would have had Iphis socially de-transition and begin to live as a woman for the first time in his life.

I should stress that I’m not accusing any of the scholars I’ve cited or referred to of being deliberately trans-exclusionary. But whoever are the worst offenders, there are too many who believe that gender transition is pointless, because gender is purely performative, and ought ideally to be abolished entirely. This kind of gender abolitionism obviously demands a lot more self-denial from trans people than it does from cis people (those who are happy with their assigned sex), since we are urged — even by other queers — to live as if we inhabited a post-gender world that simply does not exist.

But where the contemporary sex/gender dichotomy posits “biological” sex as unchangeable (unless an Ovidian deity’s help can be procured), Catullus’s famous Attis epyllion shows quite a different view. In this poem, the eponymous Attis, who shares the name of the goddess Cybele’s mortal lover and first gallus priest, becomes a gallus himself when, in a religious fury, he castrates himself. From this point on, Catullus uses feminine gender for him — and for his fellow “gallae,” who have all undertaken the same procedure at some point.

When Attis (whose name, like that of Iphis, is effectively gender neutral) awakes the next day, and his previous fervor has left him, he laments that he has become a woman, a Maenad, a sterile man; and the poet has already called him a notha mulier: an illegitimate woman — but still a kind of woman. I nevertheless use masculine pronouns advisedly, since the epyllion hardly suggests that Attis will come to terms with what has happened. No doubt Catullus has presented the fascinating ancient subculture of galli in a demeaning light, but the fact he gets right is that any sort of castration will change someone’s sexual characteristics.

In a society that had unique social roles for eunuchs, this was obvious to anyone who discussed human anatomy. The Hippocratic writers, Aristotle, and Pliny the Elder, for example, all talk about how eunuchs to some extent “change into the female condition”, especially when it comes to the problem of male hair loss. Since modern surgeries and Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) can accomplish far more, it is ironic that so much of contemporary trans antagonism or transmisia consists of telling trans people that we will never be more than women who destroy their beautiful bodies or mutilated men in dresses. For an ancient chauvinist like Dio of Prusa, by contrast, even shaving “the hair which is distinctive of the full-grown male” was an unnatural modification of the body and a moral danger.

I’m not arguing that a cis man — i.e. someone who was Assigned Male At Birth (AMAB) and is happy with it — can be turned into a woman purely through medical interventions, or that a trans man who doesn’t take hormones is still “biologically female” just because his body doesn’t look a certain way. Rather, the mutability of sex goes hand in hand with the fact that gender is more than just a performance: because all gendered and sexed categories are so entangled in cultural assumptions and social structures, nothing is ever just biology or gender. Gender identity and expression intersect and inform each other. That’s why what is unconventional masculinity for one person is nonbinary transidentity for another. That’s why some genders are culturally specific and a Lakȟóta who is wíŋkte is neither cis nor trans. That’s why what is regarded as natural has more to do with the oppressive ways society is organized than with what is conducive to someone’s bodily well-being:

“Question: with whom is a hermaphrodite comparable? I rather think each one should be ascribed to that sex which is prevalent in his or her make-up.”
—Justinian, Digest 1.16.10–11

In a post-colonial legal order that, with some important exceptions, requires every person on the globe to be either male or female, there is more askew than cis people being forced into stereotypes; more than the medical gatekeeping faced by trans people. There are also the “reparative” operations routinely performed on intersex infants to make them fit into one of these two categories — rather than fitting the categories to the people. And there is also the unique marginalization experienced by people who are both intersex and trans.

All these oppressive structures form part of a long and violent history of Western cis-, binary and dyadic normativity. As long as Classicists regard all outside that normative space, whether living or dead, as mere curios to be regarded with the same interest as the Priapea, the erotic graffiti at Pompeii, or Pliny’s dog-headed people, they are also complicit in that violence. That is a shame, because I feel like Classics can contribute unique insights to Intersex and Transgender Studies. But not until you admit that we actually exist.

L.K.M. Maisel is a B.A. in Classics and a Master’s student at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

https://eidolon.pub/

III

The Origins of Rome

The Rape of the Sabine Women by Pablo Picasso

In this module, you will read Livy’s story of the founding of Rome, which contains two defining moments of rape:  Rhea Silva and the Sabine Women.  The first book of Vergil’s Aeneid is included as well; Vergil tells an abbreviated “history” of early Rome (delivered as the fated future) and introduces Dido, another pivotal woman parlayed into Rome’s inexorable rise.

Time permitting, do some research on the afterlife of the rape of the Sabine women in art.  How many representations of this scene can you find?

Finally, please read Aimee Hinds’ Eidolon piece: “Rape or Romance?”

If you are too busy/stressed/blue-lit to get through all of the readings for this week and something has to give, please pay close attention to the Livy and Vergil and opt out of the last, optional, chapter:

To think through how to read material (Livy more obviously, and Vergil more subtly) that centers rape, you may OPTIONALLY read Amy Richlin’s Reading Ovid’s Rapes.  Richlin quotes Ovid’s version of the rape of the Sabine Women and references his telling of the rape of Lucretia, which you will for read next week.

Although we won’t be diving into the Metamorphoses, which Richlin discusses at some length, the questions she asks — and suggestions she makes — will help us organize our work in this and our next module.  If you are interested to take up Ovid’s Met, it is a rich, dense text with lots of content worth engaging in from a feminist, intersectional perspective and you could do so for your final project in this seminar (or join me sometime in Intermediate Latin, where we translate some of the passages Richlin references and have some rich conversations about whether they are worth the effort.)

Please prepare this module (continuing to annotate with hypothes.is) for 9/15.

9

Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book I: Preface - 13

Livy (Titus Livius), the great Roman historian, was born at or near Patavium (Padua) in 64 or 59 BCE; he may have lived mostly in Rome but died at Patavium, in 12 or 17 CE.

Livy’s only extant work is part of his history of Rome from the foundation of the city to 9 BCE. Of its 142 books, we have just 35, and short summaries of all the rest except two. The whole work was, long after his death, divided into Decades or series of ten. Books 1–10 we have entire; books 11–20 are lost; books 21–45 are entire, except parts of 41 and 43–45. Of the rest only fragments and the summaries remain. In splendid style Livy, a man of wide sympathies and proud of Rome’s past, presented an uncritical but clear and living narrative of the rise of Rome to greatness.

Excerpts from the Loeb Classical Library edition.

Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (History of Rome ): Book One

Preface

Whether I am likely to accomplish anything worthy of the labour, if I record the achievements of the Roman people from the foundation of the city, I do not really know, nor if I knew would I dare to avouch it; perceiving as I do that the theme[1] is not only old but hackneyed, through the constant succession of new historians, who believe either that in their facts they can produce more authentic information, or that in their style they will prove better than the rude attempts of the ancients. Yet, however this shall be, it will be a satisfaction to have done myself as much as lies in me to commemorate the deeds of the foremost people of the world; and if in so vast a company of writers my own reputation should be obscure, my consolation would be the fame and greatness of those whose renown will throw mine into the shade. Moreover, my subject involves infinite labour, seeing that it must be traced back [3] above seven hundred years, and that proceeding from slender beginnings it has so increased as now to be burdened by its own magnitude; and at the same time I doubt not that to most readers the earliest origins and the period immediately succeeding them will give little pleasure, for they will be in haste to reach these modern times, in which the might of a people which has long been very powerful is working its own undoing. I myself, on the contrary, shall seek in this an additional reward for my toil, that I may avert my gaze from the troubles which our age has been witnessing for so many years, so long at least as I am absorbed in the recollection of the brave days of old, free from every care which, even if it could not divert the historian’s mind from the truth, might nevertheless cause it anxiety.[1]

Such traditions as belong to the time before the city was founded, or rather was presently to be founded, and are rather adorned with poetic legends than based upon trustworthy historical proofs, I purpose neither to affirm nor to refute. It is the privilege of antiquity to mingle divine things with human, and so to add dignity to the beginnings of cities; and if any people ought to be allowed to consecrate their origins and refer them to a divine source, so great is the military glory of the Roman People that when they profess that their Father and the Father of their Founder was none other than Mars, the nations of the earth may well submit to this also with as good a grace as they submit to Rome’s dominion. But to such legends as these, however they shall be regarded and judged, I shall, for my own part, attach no great importance. Here are the questions to which I would have every reader [5] give his close attention—what life and morals were like; through what men and by what policies, in peace and in war, empire was established and enlarged; then let him note how, with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first gave way, as it were, then sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge[1] which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that you behold the lessons of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous monument;[2] from these you may choose for yourself and for your own state what to imitate, from these mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result. For the rest, either love of the task I have set myself deceives me, or no state was ever greater, none more righteous or richer in good examples, none ever was where avarice and luxury came into the social order so late, or where humble means and thrift were so highly esteemed and so long held in honour. For true it is that the less men’s wealth was, the less was their greed. Of late, riches have brought in avarice, and excessive pleasures the longing to carry wantonness and licence to the point of ruin for oneself and of universal destruction.But complaints are sure to be disagreeable, even when they shall perhaps be necessary; let the beginning, at all events, of so great an enterprise have none. With good omens rather would we begin, and, if historians had the same custom which poets have, [7] with prayers and entreaties to the gods and goddesses, that they might grant us to bring to a successful issue the great task we have undertaken.

I

First of all, then, it is generally agreed that when Troy was taken vengeance was wreaked upon the other Trojans, but that two, Aeneas and Antenor, were spared all the penalties of war by the Achivi, owing to long-standing claims of hospitality, and because they had always advocated peace and the giving back of Helen. They then experienced various vicissitudes. Antenor, with a company of Eneti who had been expelled from Paphlagonia in a revolution and were looking for a home and a leader—for they had lost their king, Pylaemenes, at Troy[1]—came to the inmost bay of the Adriatic. There, driving out the Euganei, who dwelt between the sea and the Alps, the Eneti and Trojans took possession of those lands. And in fact the place where they first landed is called Troy, and the district is therefore known as Trojan, while the people as a whole are called the Veneti. Aeneas, driven from home by a similar misfortune, but guided by fate to undertakings of greater consequence, came first to Macedonia; thence was carried, in his quest of a place of settlement, to Sicily; and from Sicily laid his course towards the land of Laurentum. This place too is called Troy. Landing there, the Trojans, as men who, after their all but immeasurable wanderings, had nothing left but their swords and ships, were driving booty from the fields, when King Latinus and the Aborigines, who then occupied that country, rushed down from their city and their fields to repel with arms the violence of the invaders. From this point the tradition follows two [9] lines. Some say that Latinus, having been defeated in the battle, made a peace with Aeneas, and later an alliance of marriage.[1]Others maintain that when the opposing lines had been drawn up, Latinus did not wait for the charge to sound, but advanced amidst his chieftains and summoned the captain of the strangers to a parley. He then inquired what men they were, whence they had come, what mishap had caused them to leave their home, and what they sought in landing on the coast of Laurentum. He was told that the people were Trojans and their leader Aeneas, son of Anchises and Venus; that their city had been burnt, and that, driven from home, they were looking for a dwelling-place and a site where they might build a city. Filled with wonder at the renown of the race and the hero, and at his spirit, prepared alike for war or peace, he gave him his right hand in solemn pledge of lasting friendship. The commanders then made a treaty, and the armies saluted each other. Aeneas became a guest in the house of Latinus; there the latter, in the presence of his household gods, added a domestic treaty to the public one, by giving his daughter in marriage to Aeneas. This event removed any doubt in the minds of the Trojans that they had brought their wanderings to an end at last in a permanent and settled habitation. They founded a town, which Aeneas named Lavinium, after his wife In a short time, moreover, there was a male scion of the new marriage, to whom his parents gave the name of Ascanius.

II

War was then made upon Trojans and Aborigines alike. Turnus was king of the Rutulians, and to him Lavinia had been betrothed before the coming [11] of Aeneas. Indignant that a stranger should be preferred before him, he attacked, at the same time, both Aeneas and Latinus. Neither army came off rejoicing from that battle. The Rutulians were beaten: the victorious Aborigines and Trojans lost their leader Latinus. Then Turnus and the Rutulians, discouraged at their situation, fled for succour to the opulent and powerful Etruscans and their king Mezentius, who held sway in Caere, at that time an important town. Mezentius had been, from the very beginning, far from pleased at the birth of the new city; he now felt that the Trojan state was growing much more rapidly than was altogether safe for its neighbours, and readily united his forces with those of the Rutulians. Aeneas, that he might win the goodwill of the Aborigines to confront so formidable an array, and that all might possess not only the same rights but also the same name, called both nations Latins;[1]and from that time on the Aborigines were no less ready and faithful than the Trojans in the service of King Aeneas. Accordingly, trusting to this friendly spirit of the two peoples, which were growing each day more united, and, despite the power of Etruria, which had filled with the glory of her name not only the lands but the sea as well, along the whole extent of Italy from the Alps to the Sicilian Strait, Aeneas declined to defend himself behind his walls, as he might have done, but led out his troops to battle. The fight which ensued was a victory for the Latins: for Aeneas it was, besides, the last of his mortal labours. He lies buried, whether it is fitting and right [13] to term him god or man, on the banks of the river Numicus; men, however, call him Jupiter Indiges.[1]

III

Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, was not yet ripe for authority; yet the authority was kept for him, unimpaired, until he arrived at manhood. Meanwhile, under a woman’s regency, the Latin State and the kingdom of his father and his grandfather stood unshaken—so strong was Lavinia’s character—until the boy could claim it. I shall not discuss the question—for who could affirm for certain so ancient a matter?—whether this boy was Ascanius, or an elder brother, born by Creusa while Ilium yet stood, who accompanied his father when he fled from the city, being the same whom the Julian family call lulus and claim as the author of their name. This Ascanius, no matter where born, or of what mother—it is agreed in any case that he was Aeneas’ son—left Lavinium, when its population came to be too large, for it was already a flourishing and wealthy city for those days, to his mother, or stepmother, and founded a new city himself below the Alban Mount. This was known from its position, as it lay stretched out along the ridge, by the name of Alba Longa. From the settlement of Lavinium to the planting of the colony at Alba Longa was an interval of some thirty years. Yet the nation had grown so powerful, in consequence especially of the defeat of the Etruscans, that even when Aeneas died, and even when a woman became its regent and a boy began his apprenticeship as king, neither Mezentius and his Etruscans nor any other neighbours dared to attack them. Peace had been agreed to on these terms, that the River Albula, which men now call the Tiber, should be the boundary [15] between the Etruscans and the Latins. Next Silvius reigned, son of Ascanius, born, as it chanced, in the forest. He begat Aeneas Silvius, and he Latinus Silvius. By him several colonies were planted, and called the Ancient Latins. Thereafter the cognomen Silvius was retained by all who ruled at Alba. From Latinus came Alba, from Alba Atys, from Atys Capys, from Capys Capetus, from Capetus Tiberinus. This last king was drowned in crossing the River Albula, and gave the stream the name which has been current with later generations. Then Agrippa, son of Tiberinus, reigned, and after Agrippa Romulus Silvius was king, having received the power from his father. Upon the death of Romulus by lightning, the kingship passed from him to Aventinus. This king was buried on that hill, which is now a part of the city of Rome, and gave his name to the hill. Proca ruled next. He begat Numitor and Amulius; to Numitor, the elder, he bequeathed the ancient realm of the Silvian family. Yet violence proved more potent than a father’s wishes or respect for seniority. Amulius drove out his brother and ruled in his stead. Adding crime to crime, he destroyed Numitor’s male issue; and Rhea Silvia, his brother’s daughter, he appointed a Vestal under pretence of honouring her, and by consigning her to perpetual virginity, deprived her of the hope of children.

IV

But the Fates were resolved, as I suppose, upon the founding of this great City, and the beginning of the mightiest of empires, next after that of Heaven. The Vestal was ravished, and having given birth to twin sons, named Mars as the father of her doubtful offspring, whether actually so believing, or because it seemed less wrong if a god [17] were the author of her fault. But neither gods nor men protected the mother herself or her babes from the king’s cruelty; the priestess he ordered to be manacled and cast into prison, the children to be committed to the river. It happened by singular good fortune that the Tiber having spread beyond its banks into stagnant pools afforded nowhere any access to the regular channel of the river, and the men who brought the twins were led to hope that being infants they might be drowned, no matter how sluggish the stream. So they made shift to discharge the king’s command, by exposing the babes at the nearest point of the overflow, where the fig-tree Ruminalis—formerly, they say, called Romularis—now stands. In those days this was a wild and uninhabited region. The story persists that when the floating basket in which the children had been exposed was left high and dry by the receding water, a she-wolf, coming down out of the surrounding hills to slake her thirst, turned her steps towards the cry of the infants, and with her teats gave them suck so gently, that the keeper of the royal flock found her licking them with her tongue. Tradition assigns to this man the name of Faustulus, and adds that he carried the twins to his hut and gave them to his wife Larentia to rear. Some think that Larentia, having been free with her favours, had got the name of “she-wolf” among the shepherds, and that this gave rise to this marvellous story.[1]The boys, thus born and reared, had no sooner attained to youth than they began—yet without neglecting the farmstead or the flocks—to range the glades of the mountains for game. Having in this way gained both strength and resolution, they would now not [19] only face wild beasts, but would attack robbers laden with their spoils, and divide up what they took from them among the shepherds, with whom they shared their toils and pranks, while their band of young men grew larger every day.

V

They say that the Palatine was even then the scene of the merry festival of the Lupercalia which we have to-day, and that the hill was named Pallantium, from Pallanteum, an Arcadian city, and then Palatium.[1] There Evander, an Arcadian of that stock, who had held the place many ages before the time of which I am writing, is said to have established the yearly rite, derived from Arcadia, that youths should run naked about in playful sport, doing honour to Lycaean Pan, whom the Romans afterwards called Inuus. When the young men were occupied in this celebration, the rite being generally known, some robbers who had been angered by the loss of their plunder laid an ambush for them, and although Romulus successfully defended himself, captured Remus and delivered up their prisoner to King Amulius, even lodging a complaint against him. The main charge was that the brothers made raids on the lands of Numitor, and pillaged them, with a band of young fellows which they had got together, like an invading enemy. So Remus was given up to Numitor to be punished. From the very beginning Faustulus had entertained the suspicion that they were children of the royal blood that he was bringing up in his house; for he was aware both that infants had been exposed by order of the king, and that the time when he had himself taken up the children exactly coincided with that event. But he had been unwilling that the [21] matter should be disclosed prematurely, until opportunity offered or necessity compelled. Necessity came first; accordingly, driven by fear, he revealed the facts to Romulus. It chanced that Numitor too, having Remus in custody, and hearing that the brothers were twins, had been reminded, upon considering their age and their far from servile nature, of his grandsons. The inquiries he made led him to the same conclusion, so that he was almost ready to acknowledge Remus. Thus on every hand the toils were woven about the king. Romulus did not assemble his company of youths—for he was not equal to open violence—but commanded his shepherds to come to the palace at an appointed time, some by one way, some by another, and so made his attack upon the king; while from the house of Numitor came Remus, with another party which he had got together, to help his brother. So Romulus slew the king.

VI

At the beginning of the fray Numitor exclaimed that an enemy had invaded the city and attacked the palace, and drew off the active men of the place to serve as an armed garrison for the defence of the citadel; and when he saw the young men approaching, after they had dispatched the king, to congratulate him, he at once summoned a council, and laid before it his brother’s crimes against himself, the parentage of his grandsons, and how they had been born, reared, and recognised. He then announced the tyrant’s death, and declared himself to be responsible for it. The brothers advanced with their band through the midst of the crowd, and hailed their grandfather king, whereupon such a shout of assent arose from the entire throng as confirmed the new monarch’s title and authority. [23]

The Alban state being thus made over to Numitor, Romulus and Remus were seized with the desire to found a city in the region where they had been exposed and brought up. And in fact the population of Albans and Latins was too large; besides, there were the shepherds. All together, their numbers might easily lead men to hope that Alba would be small, and Lavinium small, compared with the city which they should build. These considerations were interrupted by the curse of their grandsires, the greed of kingly power, and by a shameful quarrel which grew out of it, upon an occasion innocent enough. Since the brothers were twins, and respect for their age could not determine between them, it was agreed that the gods who had those places in their protection should choose by augury who should give the new city its name, who should govern it when built. Romulus took the Palatine for his augural quarter, Remus the Aventine.

VII

Remus  is said to have been the first to receive an augury, from the flight of six vultures. The omen had been already reported when twice that number appeared to Romulus. Thereupon each was saluted king by his own followers, the one party laying claim to the honour from priority, the other from the number of the birds. They then engaged in a battle of words and, angry taunts leading to bloodshed, Remus was struck down in the affray. The commoner story is that Remus leaped over the new walls in mockery of his brother, whereupon Romulus in great anger slew him, and in menacing wise added these words withal, “So perish whoever else shall leap over my walls!”[1] Thus Romulus acquired sole power, and the city, thus founded, was called by its founder’s name. [25]

His first act was to fortify the Palatine, on which he had himself been reared. To other gods he sacrificed after the Alban custom, but employed the Greek for Hercules, according to the institution of Evander. The story is as follows: Hercules, after slaying Geryones, was driving off his wondrously beautiful cattle, when, close to the river Tiber, where he had swum across it with the herd before him, he found a green spot, where he could let the cattle rest and refresh themselves with the abundant grass; and being tired from his journey he lay down himself. When he had there fallen into a deep sleep, for he was heavy with food and wine, a shepherd by the name of Cacus, who dwelt hard by and was insolent by reason of his strength, was struck with the beauty of the animals, and wished to drive them off as plunder. But if he had driven the herd into his cave, their tracks would have been enough to guide their owner to the place in his search; he therefore chose out those of the cattle that were most remarkable for their beauty, and turning them the other way, dragged them into the cave by their tails. At daybreak Hercules awoke. Glancing over the herd, and perceiving that a part of their number was lacking, he proceeded to the nearest cave, in case there might be foot-prints leading into it. When he saw that they were all turned outward and yet did not lead to any other place, he was confused and bewildered, and made ready to drive his herd away from that uncanny spot. As the cattle were being driven off, some of them lowed, as usually happens, missing those which had been left behind. They were answered with a low by the cattle shut up in the cave, and this made Hercules turn back. When he came towards the [27] cave, Cacus would have prevented his approach with force, but received a blow from the hero’s club, and calling in vain upon the shepherds to protect him, gave up the ghost. Evander, an exile from the Peloponnese, controlled that region in those days, more through personal influence than sovereign power. He was a man revered for his wonderful invention of letters,[1] a new thing to men unacquainted with the arts, and even more revered because of the divinity which men attributed to his mother Carmenta, whom those tribes had admired as a prophetess before the Sibyl’s coming into Italy. Now this Evander was then attracted by the concourse of shepherds, who, crowding excitedly about the stranger, were accusing him as a murderer caught red-handed. When he had been told about the deed and the reason for it, and had marked the bearing of the man and his figure, which was somewhat ampler and more august than a mortal’s, he inquired who he was. Upon learning his name, his father, and his birth-place, he exclaimed, “Hail, Hercules, son of Jupiter! You are he, of whom my mother, truthful interpreter of Heaven, foretold to me that you should be added to the number of the gods, and that an altar should be dedicated to you here which the nation one day to be the most powerful on earth should call the Greatest Altar, and should serve according to your rite.” Hercules gave him his hand, and declared that he accepted the omen, and would fulfil the prophecy by establishing and dedicating an altar. Then and there men took a choice victim from the herd, and for the first time made sacrifice to Hercules. For the ministry and the banquet they employed the Potitii and the Pinarii, being the families [29] of most distinction then living in that region. It fell out that the Potitii were there at the appointed time, and to them were served the inwards; the Pinarii came after the inwards had been eaten, in season for the remainder of the feast. Thence came the custom, which persisted as long as the Pinarian family endured, that they should not partake of the inwards at that sacrifice. The Potitii, instructed by Evander, were priests of this cult for many generations, until, having delegated to public slaves the solemn function of their family, the entire stock of the Potitii died out. This was the only sacred observance, of all those of foreign origin, which Romulus then adopted, honouring even then the immortality won by worth to which his own destiny was leading him.[1]

VIII

When Romulus had duly attended to the worship of the gods, he called the people together and gave them the rules of law, since nothing else but law could unite them into a single body politic. But these, he was persuaded, would only appear binding in the eyes of a rustic people in case he should invest his own person with majesty, by adopting emblems of authority. He therefore put on a more august state in every way, and especially by the assumption of twelve lictors.[2] Some think the twelve birds which had given him an augury of kingship led him to choose this number. For my part, I am content to share the opinion of those who derive from the neighbouring Etruscans (whence were borrowed the curule chair and purple-bordered toga) not only the type of attendants but their number as well—a number which the Etruscans themselves are thought to have chosen because each [31] of the twelve cities which united to elect the king contributed one lictor.

Meanwhile the City was expanding and reaching out its walls to include one place after another, for they built their defences with an eye rather to the population which they hoped one day to have than to the numbers they had then. Next, lest his big City should be empty, Romulus resorted to a plan for increasing the inhabitants which had long been employed by the founders of cities, who gather about them an obscure and lowly multitude and pretend that the earth has raised up sons to them. In the place which is now enclosed, between the two groves as you go up the hill,[1] he opened a sanctuary. Thither fled, from the surrounding peoples, a miscellaneous rabble, without distinction of bond or free, eager for new conditions; and these constituted the first advance in power towards that greatness at which Romulus aimed. He had now no reason to be dissatisfied with his strength, and proceeded to add policy to strength. He appointed a hundred senators, whether because this number seemed to him sufficient, or because there were no more than a hundred who could be designated Fathers.[2] At all events, they received the designation of fathers from their rank, and their descendants were called patricians.
IX

Rome was now strong enough to hold her own in war with any of the adjacent states; but owing to the want of women a single generation was likely to see the end of her greatness, since she had neither prospect of posterity at home nor the right of intermarriage with her neighbours. So, on the advice of the senate, Romulus sent envoys round among all the neighbouring nations to solicit for the new people [33] an alliance and the privilege of intermarrying, Cities, they argued, as well as all other things, take their rise from the lowliest beginnings. As time goes on, those which are aided by their own worth and by the favour of Heaven achieve great power and renown. They said they were well assured that Rome’s origin had been blessed with the favour of Heaven, and that worth would not be lacking; their neighbours should not be reluctant to mingle their stock and their blood with the Romans, who were as truly men as they were. Nowhere did the embassy obtain a friendly hearing. In fact men spurned, at the same time that they feared, both for themselves and their descendants, that great power which was then growing up in their midst; and the envoys were frequently asked, on being dismissed, if they had opened a sanctuary for women as well as for men, for in that way only would they obtain suitable wives. This was a bitter insult to the young Romans, and the matter seemed certain to end in violence. Expressly to afford a fitting time and place for this, Romulus, concealing his resentment, made ready solemn games in honour of the equestrian Neptune, which he called Consualia.[1]He then bade proclaim the spectacle to the surrounding peoples, and his subjects prepared to celebrate it with all the resources within their knowledge and power, that they might cause the occasion to be noised abroad and eagerly expected. Many people—for they were also eager to see the new city—gathered for the festival, especially those who lived nearest, the inhabitants of Caenina, Crustumium, and Antemnae. The Sabines, [35] too, came with all their people, including their children and wives. They were hospitably entertained in every house, and when they had looked at the site of the city, its walls, and its numerous buildings, they marvelled that Rome had so rapidly grown great. When the time came for the show, and people’s thoughts and eyes were busy with it, the preconcerted attack began. At a given signal the young Romans darted this way and that, to seize and carry off the maidens. In most cases these were taken by the men in whose path they chanced to be. Some, of exceptional beauty, had been marked out for the chief senators, and were carried off to their houses by plebeians to whom the office had been entrusted. One, who far excelled the rest in mien and loveliness, was seized, the story relates, by the gang of a certain Thalassius. Being repeatedly asked for whom they were bearing her off, they kept shouting that no one should touch her, for they were taking her to Thalassius, and this was the origin of the wedding-cry.[1]The sports broke up in a panic, and the parents of the maidens fled sorrowing. They charged the Romans with the crime of violating hospitality, and invoked the gods to whose solemn games they had come, deceived in violation of religion and honour. The stolen maidens were no more hopeful of their plight, nor less indignant. But Romulus himself went amongst them and explained that the pride of their parents had caused this deed, when they had refused their neighbours the right to intermarry; nevertheless the daughters should be wedded and become co-partners in all the possessions of the Romans, in their citizenship and, dearest privilege of all to the human race, in their children; [37] only let them moderate their anger, and give their hearts to those to whom fortune had given their persons. A sense of injury had often given place to affection, and they would find their husbands the kinder for this reason, that every man would earnestly endeavour not only to be a good husband, but also to console his wife for the home and parents she had lost. His arguments were seconded by the wooing of the men, who excused their act on the score of passion and love, the most moving of all pleas to a woman’s heart.

X

The resentment of the brides was already much diminished at the very moment when their parents, in mourning garb and with tears and lamentations, were attempting to arouse their states to action. Nor did they confine their complaints to their home towns, but thronged from every side to the house of Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines; and thither, too, came official embassies, for the name of Tatius was the greatest in all that country. The men of Caenina, Crustumium, and Antemnae, were those who had had a share in the wrong. It seemed to them that Tatius and the Sabines were procrastinating, and without waiting for them these three tribes arranged for a joint campaign. But even the Crustuminians and Antemnates moved too slowly to satisfy the burning anger of the Caeninenses, and accordingly that nation invaded alone the Roman territory. But while they were dispersed and engaged in pillage, Romulus appeared with his troops and taught them, by an easy victory, how ineffectual is anger without strength. Their army he broke and routed, and pursued it as it fled; their king he killed [39] in battle and despoiled; their city, once their leader was slain, he captured at the first assault. He then led his victorious army back, and being not more splendid in his deeds than willing to display them, he arranged the spoils of the enemy’s dead commander upon a frame, suitably fashioned for the purpose, and, carrying it himself, mounted the Capitol. Having there deposited his burden, by an oak which the shepherds held sacred, at the same time as he made his offering he marked out the limits of a temple to Jupiter, and bestowed a title upon him. “Jupiter Feretrius,” he said, “to thee I, victorious Romulus, myself a king, bring the panoply of a king, and dedicate a sacred precinct within the bounds which I have even now marked off in my mind, to be a seat for the spoils of honour which men shall bear hither in time to come, following my example, when they have slain kings and commanders of the enemy.” This was the origin of the first temple that was consecrated in Rome.[1]It pleased Heaven, in the sequel, that while the founder’s words should not be in vain, when he declared that men should bring spoils thither in the after time, yet the glory of that gift should not be staled by a multitude of partakers. Twice only since then, in all these years with their many wars, have the spoils of honour been won; so rarely have men had the good fortune to attain to that distinction.[2]

XI

While the Romans were thus occupied in the City, the army of the Antemnates seized the opportunity afforded by their absence, and made an inroad upon their territory; but so swiftly was the Roman [41]levy led against them that they, too, were taken off b.c. 753–717 their guard while scattered about in the fields. They were therefore routed at the first charge and shout, and their town was taken. As Romulus was exulting in his double victory, his wife Hersilia, beset with entreaties by the captive women, begged him to forgive their parents and receive them into the state; which would, in that case, gain in strength by harmony. He readily granted her request. He then set out to meet the Crustuminians, who were marching to attack him. They offered even less resistance than their allies had done, for their ardour had been quenched by the defeats of the others. Colonies were sent out to both places, though most of the colonists preferred to enrol for Crustumium on account of the fertility of its soil. On the other hand, many persons left Crustumium and came to live in Rome, chiefly parents and kinsmen of the captured women.

The last to attack Rome were the Sabines, and this war was by far the gravest of all, for passion and greed were not their motives, nor did they parade war before they made it. To their prudence they even added deception. Spurius Tarpeius commanded the Roman citadel. This man’s maiden daughter was bribed with gold by Tatius to admit armed men into the fortress: she happened at that time to have gone outside the walls to fetch water for a sacrifice.[1] Once within, they threw their shields upon her and killed her so, whether to make it appear that the citadel had been taken by assault, or to set an example, that no one might anywhere keep faith with a traitor. There is also a legend that because most of the Sabines wore heavy golden [43] bracelets on their left arms and magnificent jewelled rings, she had stipulated for what they had on their left arms, and that they had therefore heaped their shields upon her, instead of gifts of gold. Some say that, in virtue of the compact that they should give her what they wore on their arms, she flatly demanded their shields and, her treachery being perceived, forfeited her life to the bargain she herself had struck.[1]

XII

Be that as it may, the Sabines held the citadel. Next day the Roman army was drawn up, and covered the ground between the Palatine Hill and the Capitoline, but the Sabines would not come down till rage and eagerness to regain the citadel had goaded their enemy into marching up the slope against them. Two champions led the fighting, the Sabine Mettius Curtius on the one side, and the Roman Hostius Hostilius on the other. Hostius held the Romans firm, despite their disadvantage of position, by the reckless courage he displayed in the thick of the fray. But when he fell, the Roman line gave way at once and fled towards the old gate of the Palatine. Romulus himself was swept along in the crowd of the fugitives, till lifting his sword and shield to heaven, he cried, “O Jupiter, it was thy omen that directed me when I laid here on the Palatine the first foundations of my City. The fortress is already bought by a crime and in the possession of the Sabines, whence they are come, sword in hand, across the valley to seek us here. But do thou, father of gods and men, keep them back from this spot at least; deliver the Romans from their terror, and stay their shameful flight! I here vow to thee, Jupiter the Stayer, a temple, to be a [45] memorial to our descendants how the City was saved b.c. by thy present help.” Having uttered this prayer he exclaimed, as if he had perceived that it was heard, “Here, Romans, Jupiter Optimus Maximus commands us to stand and renew the fight!” The Romans did stand, as though directed by a voice from Heaven, Romulus himself rushing into the forefront of the battle. Mettius Curtius, on the Sabine side, had led the charge down from the citadel, and driven the Romans in disorder over all that ground which the Forum occupies. He was not now far from the gate of the Palatine, shouting, “We have beaten our faithless hosts, our cowardly enemies! They know now how great is the difference between carrying off maidens and fighting with men!” While he pronounced this boast a band of gallant youths, led on by Romulus, assailed him. It chanced that Mettius was fighting on horseback at the time, and was therefore the more easily put to flight. As he fled, the Romans followed; and the rest of their army, too, fired by the reckless daring of their king, drove the Sabines before them. Mettius plunged into a swamp, his horse becoming unmanageable in the din of the pursuit, and even the Sabines were drawn off from the general engagement by the danger to so great a man. As for Mettius, heartened by the gestures and shouts of his followers and the encouragement of the throng, he made his escape; and the Romans and the Sabines renewed their battle in the valley that lies between the two hills. But the advantage rested with the Romans.

XIII

Then the Sabine women, whose wrong had given rise to the war, with loosened hair and torn [47]garments, their woman’s timidity lost in a sense of their misfortune, dared to go amongst the flying missiles, and rushing in from the side, to part the hostile forces and disarm them of their anger, beseeching their fathers on this side, on that their husbands, that fathers-in-law and sons-in-law should not stain themselves with impious bloodshed, nor pollute with parricide the suppliants’ children, grandsons to one party and sons to the other. “If you regret,” they continued, “the relationship that unites you, if you regret the marriage-tie, turn your anger against us; we are the cause of war, the cause of wounds, and even death to both our husbands and our parents. It will be better for us to perish than to live, lacking either of you, as widows or as orphans.” It was a touching plea, not only to the rank and file, but to their leaders as well. A stillness fell on them, and a sudden hush. Then the leaders came forward to make a truce, and not only did they agree on peace, but they made one people out of the two. They shared the sovereignty, but all authority was transferred to Rome. In this way the population was doubled, and that some concession might after all be granted the Sabines, the citizens were named Quirites, from the town of Cures.[1]As a reminder of this battle they gave the name of Curtian Lake to the pool where the horse of Curtius first emerged from the deep swamp and brought his rider to safety.[2]

The sudden exchange of so unhappy a war for a joyful peace endeared the Sabine women even more to their husbands and parents, and above all to [49] Romulus himself. And so, when he divided the people into thirty curiae, he named these wards after the women.[1] Undoubtedly the number of the women was somewhat greater than this, but tradition does not tell whether it was their age, their own or their husbands’ rank, or the casting of lots, that determined which of them should give their names to the wards. At the same time there were formed three centuries of knights: the Ramnenses were named after Romulus; the Titienses after Titus Tatius; the name and origin of the Luceres are alike obscure.[2] From this time forth the two kings ruled not only jointly but in harmony.

XIV

Some years later the kinsmen of King Tatius maltreated the envoys of the Laurentians, and when their fellow-citizens sought redress under the law of nations, Titus yielded to his partiality for his relations and to their entreaties. In consequence of this he drew down their punishment upon himself, for at Lavinium, whither he had gone to the annual sacrifice, a mob came together and killed him. This act is said to have awakened less resentment than was proper in Romulus, whether owing to the disloyalty that attends a divided rule, or because he thought Tatius had been not unjustly slain. He therefore declined to go to war; but yet, in order that he might atone for the insults to the envoys and the murder of the king, he caused the covenant between Rome and Lavinium to be renewed.

Thus with the Laurentians peace was preserved against all expectation; but another war broke out, much nearer, and indeed almost at the city gates. The men of Fidenae, perceiving the growth of a power which they thought too near themselves for [51] safety, did not wait till its promised strength shouldbe realized, but began war themselves. Arming the young men, they sent them to ravage the land between the City and Fidenae. Thence they turned to the left—for the Tiber stopped them on the right—and by their devastations struck terror into the farmers, whose sudden stampede from the fields into the City brought the first tidings of war. Romulus led forth his army on the instant, for delay was impossible with the enemy so near, and pitched his camp a mile from Fidenae. Leaving there a small guard, he marched out with all his forces. A part of his men he ordered to lie in ambush, on this side and on that, where thick underbrush afforded cover; advancing with the greater part of the infantry and all the cavalry, and delivering a disorderly and provoking attack, in which the horsemen galloped almost up to the gates, he accomplished his purpose of drawing out the enemy. For the flight, too, which had next to be feigned, the cavalry engagement afforded a favourable pretext. And when not only the cavalry began to waver, as if undecided whether to fight or run, but the infantry also fell back, the city gates were quickly thronged by the enemy, who poured out and hurled themselves against the Roman line, and in the ardour of attack and pursuit were drawn on to the place of ambuscade. There the Romans suddenly sprang out and assailed the enemy’s flanks, while, to add to their terror, the standards of the detachment which had been left on guard were seen advancing from the camp; thus threatened by so many dangers the men of Fidenae scarcely afforded time for Romulus and those whom they had seen riding off with him to wheel about, before they [53] broke and ran, and in far greater disorder than that of the pretended fugitives whom they had just been chasing—for the flight was a real one this time—sought to regain the town. But the Fidenates did not escape their foes; the Romans followed close upon their heels, and before the gates could be shut burst into the city, as though they both formed but a single army.

XV

From Fidenae the war-spirit, by a kind of contagion, spread to the Veientes, whose hostility was aroused by their kinship with the Fidenates, Etruscans like themselves, and was intensified by the danger which lay in their very proximity to Rome, if her arms should be directed against all her neighbours. They made an incursion into Roman territory which more resembled a marauding expedition than a regular campaign; and so, without having entrenched a camp or waited for the enemy’s army, they carried off their booty from the fields and brought it back to Veii. The Romans, on the contrary, not finding their enemy in the fields, crossed the Tiber, ready and eager for a decisive struggle. When the Veientes heard that they were making a camp, and would be advancing against their city, they went out to meet them, preferring to settle the quarrel in the field of battle rather than to be shut up and compelled to fight for their homes and their town. Without employing strategy to aid his forces, the Roman king won the battle by the sheer strength of his seasoned army, and routing his enemies, pursued them to their walls. But the city was strongly fortified, besides the protection afforded by its site, and he refrained from attacking it. Their fields, indeed, he laid waste as he returned, more in [55]revenge than from a desire for booty, and this disaster, following upon their defeat, induced the Veientes to send envoys to Rome and sue for peace. They were deprived of a part of their land, and a truce was granted them for a hundred years.

Such were the principal achievements of the reign of Romulus, at home and in the field, nor is any of them incompatible with the belief in his divine origin and the divinity which was ascribed to the king after his death, whether one considers his spirit in recovering the kingdom of his ancestors, or his wisdom in founding the City and in strengthening it by warlike and peaceful measures. For it was to him, assuredly, that Rome owed the vigour which enabled her to enjoy an untroubled peace for the next forty years. Nevertheless, he was more liked by the commons than by the senate, and was preeminently dear to the hearts of his soldiers. Of these he had three hundred for a bodyguard, to whom he gave the name of Celeres,[1] and kept them by him, not only in war, but also in time of peace.
XVI

When these deathless deeds had been done, as the king was holding a muster in the Campus Martius, near the swamp of Capra, for the purpose of reviewing the army, suddenly a storm came up, with loud claps of thunder, and enveloped him in a cloud so thick as to hide him from the sight of the assembly; and from that moment Romulus was no more on earth.[2] The Roman soldiers at length recovered from their panic, when this hour of wild confusion had been succeeded by a sunny calm; but when they saw that the royal seat was empty, although they readily believed the assertion of the senators, who had been standing next to Romulus, [57] that he had been caught up on high in the blast, they nevertheless remained for some time sorrowful and silent, as if filled with the fear of orphanhood. Then, when a few men had taken the initiative, they all with one accord hailed Romulus as a god and a god’s son, the King and Father of the Roman City, and with prayers besought his favour that he would graciously be pleased forever to protect his children. There were some, I believe, even then who secretly asserted that the king had been rent in pieces by the hands of the senators, for this rumour, too, got abroad, but in very obscure terms; the other version obtained currency, owing to men’s admiration for the hero and the intensity of their panic. And the shrewd device of one man is also said to have gained new credit for the story. This was Proculus Julius, who, when the people were distracted with the loss of their king and in no friendly mood towards the senate, being, as tradition tells, weighty in council, were the matter never so important, addressed the assembly as follows: “Quirites, the Father of this City, Romulus, descended suddenly from the sky at dawn this morning and appeared to me. Covered with confusion, I stood reverently before him, praying that it might be vouchsafed me to look upon his face without sin.[1]‘Go,’ said he, ‘and declare to the Romans the will of Heaven that my Rome shall be the capital of the world; so let them cherish the art of war, and let them know and teach their children that no human strength can resist Roman arms.’ So saying,” he concluded, “Romulus departed on high.” It is wonderful what credence the people placed in that man’s tale, and how the grief for the loss of Romulus, which the plebeians [59]and the army felt, was quieted by the assurance of his immortality.

10

Vergil's Aeneid Book I

Introduction to Vergil’s Aeneid

(Adapted from O’Hara 2011)

Publius Vergilius Maro was born on October 15, 70 BCE near the town of Mantua in what was then still Cisalpine Gaul.  (This northern region was incorporated into Roman Italy in 42 BCE.). Little can be stated about his life with certainty, but much is known of his historical and cultural context.

Vergil lived and wrote in a time of political strife and uncertainty.  In his early twenties the Roman Republic was torn apart by the civil wars of 49-45 BCE, when Julius Caesar fought and defeated Pompey and his supporters.  Caesar was declared dictator perpetuo (“Dictator for Life”) early in 44 BCE but was assassinated on the Ides of March by a group of senators led by Brutus and Cassius.  They sought to restore the Republic, which, they believed, was being destroyed by Caesar’s domination and intimations of kingship.

The assassination initiated a new round of turmoil that profoundly shaped the course of Roman history.  In his will, Caesar adopted and named as his primary her his great-nephew Octavian (63 NCE – 14 CE), the man who would later be called “Augustus.”  Though only eighteen years old, Octavian managed to consolidate his powe, with Lepidus and Marc Antony, who together avenged Caesar’s death.  After they fell out with Lepidus, Marc Antony and Octavian began to grow hostile to one another.  Due, in large part, to Antony’s collaboration with Cleopatra, Octavian had Antony’s powers revoked.  Their conflict came to a head 32 BCE at Actium; Octavian defeated Cleopatra and Antony. He then reigned as princeps (“First Citizen”) of Rome from 27 BCE – 14 CE.  Vergil wrote the Aeneid mostly during the 20s, in a prestigious position of close allegiance with Augustus.  Vergil died in 19, prior to completing his final edits of the poem.

The Aeneid — Book 1 — Translated by Sarah Rudens

Arms and a man I sing, the first from Troy,

A fated exile to Lavinian shores

In Italy. On land and sea, divine will—

And Juno’s unforgetting rage—harassed him.

War racked him too, until he set his city                                                5

And gods in Latium. There his Latin race rose,

With Alban patriarchs, and Rome’s high walls.

Muse, tell me why. What stung the queen of heaven,

What insult to her power made her drive

This righteous hero through so many upsets                                       10

And hardships? Can divine hearts know such anger?

Carthage, an ancient Tyrian settlement,

Faces the Tiber’s mouth in far-off Italy;

Rich, and experienced and fierce in war.

They say that it was Juno’s favorite, second                                         15

Even to Samos. Carthage held her weapons,

Her chariot. From the start she planned that Carthage

Would rule the world—if only fate allowed!

But she had heard that one day Troy’s descendants

Would pull her Tyrian towers to the ground.                                       20

A war-proud race with broad domains would come

To cut down Africa. The Fates ordained it.

Saturn’s child feared this. She recalled the war

That she had fought at Troy for her dear Greeks—

And also what had caused her savage anger.                                        25

Deep in her heart remained the verdict given

By Paris, and his insult to her beauty,

And the rape and privileges of Ganymede—

A Trojan. In her rage, she kept from Italy

Those spared by cruel Achilles and the Greeks.                                  30

They tossed on endless seas, went wandering,

Fate-driven, year on year around the world’s seas.

It cost so much to found the Roman nation.

Sicily fell from sight. They sailed with joy

Into the open, bronze prows churning foam.                                      35

But Juno, with her deep, unhealing heart-wound,

Muttered, “Will I give up? Have I been beaten

In keeping Italy from the Trojan king?

Fate blocks me. But then why could Pallas burn

The Argive fleet and drown the men it carried,                                  40

Only to punish Ajax’ frenzied crime?

Out of the clouds she hurled Jove’s hungry fire,

Scattered the ships and overturned the sea.

Ajax, panting his life out, pierced with flame,

She whirled away and pinioned on a sharp rock.                               45

But I, parading as the queen of heaven,

Jove’s wife and sister, fight a single people

For years. Will anybody now beseech me,

Bow to me, and put presents on my altar?”

Her heart aflame with all of this, the goddess                                    50

Went to Aeolia, land of storm clouds, teeming

With wild winds. There King Aeolus rules a vast cave

That struggling winds and howling tempests fill.

He disciplines them, chains them in their prison.

They shriek with rage around the bolted doors;                                55

The mountain echoes. Seated on a pinnacle,

Aeolus holds a scepter, checks their anger—

Without him, they would seize land, sea, and deep sky

To carry with them in their breakneck flight.

Fearing this, the almighty father shut them                                       60

In that black cave and heaped high mountains on it,

And set a ruler over them to slacken

Or pull the reins in, strict in his control.

Juno approached him now and made this plea:

“The king of men and father of the gods                                             65

Gives you the right to rouse and soothe the waves.

A race I hate sails the Tyrrhenian sea,

Bringing Troy’s beaten gods to Italy.

Goad your winds into fury, swamp the ships,

Or scatter them, strew bodies on the water.                                     70

Fourteen voluptuous nymphs belong to me,

And the most beautiful is Deiopea.

Her I will make your own, in steadfast union,

If you will help me. She will spend her life

With you—the lovely children that you’ll father!”                             75

Aeolus said, “You merely must decide,

My sovereign. I must hurry to obey.

My power, my modest kingdom, and Jove’s favor

You brought me. I recline at the gods’ banquets,

I rule the stormy clouds because of you.”                                          80

With his upended spear he struck a flank

Of the hollow mountain. Like a battle charge,

The winds pour out. They spiral through the world—

The East and South gales, and the mass of whirlwinds

From Africa swoop down, uproot the sea,                                         85

And send enormous billows rolling shoreward.

The men begin to shout, the ropes to squeal.

Sudden clouds snatch away the daylight sky

From Trojan sight. Black night roosts on the sea.

Heaven resounds, and fires dance in its heights.                              90

The world becomes a threat of instant death.

A swift and icy terror numbed Aeneas.

He moaned and held his hands up to the stars

And gave a cry: “Three times and four times blessed

Are those who perished in their fathers’ sight                                    95

Beneath Troy’s walls. You, Diomedes, boldest

Of Greeks, could you not spill my soul and let me

Fall on the fields of Troy, like raging Hector

Slain by Achilles’ spear, or tall Sarpedon,

Where the Simois River churns beneath her ripples                         100

Shields, helmets, bodies of so many strong men?”

A screaming northern gale flew past his wild words

And slammed the sails, and pulled a wave toward heaven.

The oars broke, the prow swerved and set the ship

Against a looming precipice of water.                                                  105

Crews dangled on the crest, or glimpsed the seabed

Between the waves. Sand poured through seething water.

Three times the South Wind hurled them at rocks lurking

Midway across—Italians call them Altars;

Their massive spine protrudes—three times the East Wind             110

Drove them toward sandy shallows—awful sight—

And rammed them tight, and ringed them with a sand wall.

Before Aeneas’ eyes a towering wave tipped,

To strike head-on the ship of staunch Orontes

And the Lycians, and whirled the helmsman out                                115

Head first. The boat was whipped in three tight circles,

And then the hungry whirlpool swallowed it.

The endless sea showed scatterings of swimmers.

Planks, gear, and Trojan treasure strewed the waves.

The storm subdued the strong ships carrying                                    120

Ilioneus, Abas, brave Achates,

And old Aletes. Deadly water pushed

Through the hulls’ weakened joints, and fissures started

To gape. Now Neptune felt, with some alarm,

The roaring havoc that the storm let loose.                                         125

Even the still depths spurted up. He raised

His calm face from the surface and looked down.

He saw Aeneas’ ships thrown everywhere,

Trojans crushed under waves, the plunging sky.

Juno’s own brother knew her guile and anger.                                    130

He called the East and South Winds and addressed them:

“Is this the arrogance of noble birth?

Without my holy sanction, you have dared

To churn up land and sea and raise these mountains?

Which I—but first I’ll calm these waves you’ve roused.                      135

Later I’ll punish you with more than words.

Get out now, fast, and tell this to your ruler:

I was allotted kingship of the sea,

And the harsh trident. In his massive stone hall—

Your home, East Wind, and all the rest—we let him                          140

Swagger, but he must keep that dungeon locked.”

Faster than words, he calmed the swollen sea,

Chased off the mass of clouds, brought back the sun.

Cymothoe and Triton heaved the ships

Off jagged boulders. Neptune with his trident                                  145

Helped them. He freed vast sandbanks, smoothed the surface,

His weightless chariot grazing the waves’ peaks;

As often in a crowded gathering

Crude commoners in rage begin to riot,

Torches and stones fly, frenzy finds its weapons—                          150

But if they see a stern and blameless statesman,

They all fall silent, keen for him to speak.

Then he will tame their hearts and guide their passions:

Like this, the roar of the broad sea grew quiet

Under the lord’s gaze. Now beneath a clear sky,                             155

He slacked the reins and flew on with the breeze.

Aeneas’ worn-out group now fought to reach

The nearest shore, turning toward Libya.

A bay runs inland, and an island makes

A harbor with its sides; waves from the deep                                 160

Break there and flutter out their separate ways.

Mammoth cliffs flank the place, and twin stone spires

Loom to the sky. Beneath them, smooth and safe

The water hushes. Forests as a backdrop

Quiver, a grove with its black shadows rises.                                  165

At the bay’s head, rocks dip to form a cavern

With a clear spring and seats of natural rock.

Nymphs live there. At the shore no rope is needed

To hold worn ships, no hooked and biting anchor.

Aeneas landed seven ships, regrouped                                            170

From the whole fleet. The Trojans went ashore

In great and yearning love of that dry sand.

Still dripping with salt water, they lay down.

To start, Achates struck a spark from flint

And caught the flame in leaves and fed it dry twigs                      175

From all sides, till it blazed up through the tinder.

Downheartedly they got out instruments

Of Ceres, and the soaking grain they’d rescued;

They had to sear it dry before they ground it.

Meanwhile Aeneas climbed a crag to view                                     180

The great expanse of sea. Where did the wind toss

Antheus, Capys, Caicus’ lofty prow

Hung with his arms—or any Trojan vessel?

There was no ship in sight; but three stags wandered

The shore. Entire herds came after them,                                     185

And grazed in a long column through the valley.

Taking a stand, he snatched the bow and arrows

That his devoted friend Achates carried.

He brought the strutting, branching-antlered leaders

To the ground first, and then his arrows chased                         190

The mass in havoc through the leafy groves.

Exulting, he continued till he brought down

Seven large bodies for his seven ships,

Then went to share the meat out at the harbor,

And with it casks of wine that good Acestes                                195

Had stashed with them when they left Sicily—

A noble gift. Aeneas spoke this comfort:

“Friends, we are all at home with suffering—

Some worse than this—but god will end this too.

You came near Scylla’s frenzy, and the deep roar                       200

At the cliffs, you saw the rocks the Cyclops threw.

Revive your hearts, shake off your gloomy fear.

Sometime you may recall today with pleasure.

We fight through perils and catastrophes

To Latium, where divine fate promises                                        205

A peaceful homeland, a new Trojan kingdom.

Endure and live until our fortunes change.”

Sick with colossal burdens, he shammed hope

On his face, and buried grief deep in his heart.

Trojans around his prey prepared their feast,                             210

Ripped the hide off the ribs and bared the guts.

Some of them pierced the quivering chunks with spits,

Some set out cauldrons, others tended flames.

The food restored and filled them—the old wine,

The rich game—as they stretched out on the grass.                  215

After the feast, their hunger put away,

They dwelt in longing on their missing friends.

They hoped, they feared: were these men still alive,

Or past the end and deaf to any summons?

Loyal Aeneas, most of all, was groaning                                      220

Softly for keen Orontes, Amycus, Lycus,

For Gyas and Cloanthus—brave men, hard deaths.

The day was over. Jove looked down from heaven

At the sail-flying waters, outstretched lands

And shores, and far-flung nations. At the sky’s peak,               225

He fixed his gaze on Libyan territory.

His mind was anxious, busy. And now Venus

Spoke these sad words to him, her shining eyes

Filling with tears, “You, everlasting ruler

Of gods and men and fearful lightning-thrower,                     230

What great crime did Aeneas and the Trojans

Commit against you? They have died and died,

But in the whole world found no Italy.

You promised that the circling years would draw

Teucer’s new lineage from them, Romans, chieftains,            235

To rule an empire on the land and sea.

Father, what new thought turns you from this purpose?

When Troy calamitously fell, I weighed it

Against the fate to come, to my great comfort.

And yet the pummeling fortunes of these heroes                   240

Don’t change. When will you end their trials, great ruler?

Antenor could escape the swarm of Greeks;

Into Illyrian coves, into Liburnia,

He safely voyaged, to the Timavus’ source,

Where the sea breaks through nine mouths, and the mountain     245

Roars, and the echoing waves oppress the fields.

And here he founded Padua, a homeland

For Trojans, with a Trojan name, its gateway

Displaying Trojan arms. He has his rest there.

But we, your children, promised heirs to heaven,                            250

Have lost our ships—obscene!—through Someone’s anger

And treachery. We are kept from Italy.

Is this our new realm, won through righteousness?”

The gods’ and mortals’ father gave his daughter

The smile that clears the sky of storms and kissed her                  255

Lightly, and this was how he answered her:

“Take heart—no one will touch the destiny

Of your people. You will see Lavinium

In its promised walls, and raise your brave Aeneas

To the stars. No new thoughts change my purposes.                   260

But since you suffer, I will tell the future,

Opening to the light fate’s secret book.

In Italy your son will crush a fierce race

In a great war. With the Rutulians beaten,

Three winters and three summers he’ll shape walls                     265

And warrior customs, as he reigns in Latium.

But his son Ascanius, now called Iulus too

(He was named Ilus during Ilium’s empire),

Will rule while thirty spacious years encircle

Their circling months, and he will move the kingdom                270

To Alba Longa, heaving up strong ramparts.

Three centuries the dynasty of Hector

Will govern, until Ilia, royal priestess,

Conceives twin boys by Mars and gives them birth.

And the wolf’s nursling (glad to wear brown wolfskin),               275

Romulus, will then lead the race and found

The walls of Mars for Romans—named for him.

For them I will not limit time or space.

Their rule will have no end. Even hard Juno,

Who terrorizes land and sea and sky,                                            280

Will change her mind and join me as I foster

The Romans in their togas, the world’s masters.

I have decreed it. The swift years will bring

Anchises’ clan as rulers into Phthia,

And once-renowned Mycenae, and beaten Argos.                      285

The noble Trojan line will give us Caesar—

A Julian name passed down from the great Iulus—

With worldwide empire, glory heaven-high.

At ease you will receive him with his burden

Of Eastern plunder. Mortals will send him prayers here.          290

Then wars will end, cruel history grow gentle.

Vesta, old Faith, and Quirinus, with Remus

His twin, will make the laws. Tight locks of iron

Will close War’s grim gates. Inside, godless Furor,

Drooling blood on a heap of brutal weapons,                             295

Will roar against the chains that pinion him.”

Concluding, he dispatched the son of Maia

To have the Trojans welcomed down in Carthage

With its new fort. Dido, who was not privy

To fate, might keep them out. The god’s wings rowed him     300

Through the vast air, to stand on Libya’s shore.

Since it was heaven’s will, the fierce Phoenicians

Peacefully yielded; most of all their queen

Turned a calm, gentle face to meet the Trojans.

Steadfast Aeneas had a worried night,                                       305

But at the light of nurturing dawn decided

To go and find out where the wind had brought them

And who or what—the land looked wild—lived here,

And bring what he could learn to his companions.

The fleet lay hidden in a tree-lined inlet,                                  310

Under a rocky overhang enclosed

By bristling shade. He set off with Achates,

Holding two quivering pikes with iron blades.

Deep in the woods his mother came to him,

A girl in face and clothes—armed, as in Sparta,                       315

Or like Harpalyce in Thrace, outracing

The breakneck Hebrus with her harried horses—

A huntress with a bow slung, quick to hand,

From her shoulders, and the wind in her free hair,

And a loosely tied-up tunic over bare knees:                          320

She greeted them and asked, “Please, have you met

One of my sisters wandering here, or shouting,

Chasing a foam-mouthed boar? She has a quiver,

And wears a spotted lynx skin and a belt.”

Venus stopped speaking, and her son began.                         325

“Young girl, I haven’t seen or heard your sister.

But I should call you—what? There’s nothing mortal

In your face or voice. No, you must be a goddess:

Apollo’s sister? Daughter of a nymph clan?

No matter: have compassion, ease our hardship.                  330

On which of the world’s shores have we been thrown?

Beneath which tract of sky? The wind and huge waves

Drove us to this strange land in which we wander.

I’ll slaughter many victims at your altar.”

She answered, “That would surely not be right.                   335

These quivers are what Tyrian girls all carry;

We all wear purple boots, laced on our calves.

This is the Punic realm and Agenor’s city.

Unconquerable Africans surround us.

Dido is queen; she came here out of Tyre,                           340

Escaping from her brother’s persecution.

It’s quite a story; I’ll just tell the main parts.

Her husband was Sychaeus, the Phoenician

Richest in land—and she, poor thing, adored him.

Her father gave her as a virgin to him                                  345

In marriage. But Pygmalion her brother

Is king, and there is no one more depraved.

Hate rose between them. In blind lust for gold,

And indifferent to his sister’s love, Pygmalion

Wickedly caught Sychaeus at an altar                                 350

And murdered him. He dodged and made up stories,

Cynically drawing out her anxious hope.

But in her dreams there came to her the vision

Of her unburied husband’s strange, pale face.

He bared his stabbed chest, told of that cruel altar,         355

Stripped bare the monstrous crime the house had hidden.

He urged a quick escape. To aid her journey

Out of her country, he revealed where treasure,

A mass of gold and silver, lay long buried.

Alarmed, she made her plans, alerted friends—               360

All those who also hated the cruel tyrant

Or lived in sharp fear. Seizing ready ships,

They loaded them with gold. The ocean carried

Greedy Pygmalion’s wealth. A woman led.

They came here, where you now see giant walls            365

And the rising citadel of newborn Carthage.

They purchased land, ‘as much as one bull’s hide

Could reach around,’ and called the place ‘the Bull’s Hide.’

But who are you? What country are you from?

Where are you going?” Answering, Aeneas                     370

Sighed and drew words out of the depths of feeling.

“Goddess, our whole sad story, from its start,

Would keep you here until the Evening Star

Closed off Olympus, bringing this day rest.

Through endless seas, we come from ancient Troy—  375

Perhaps you’ve heard that name. A storm has thrust us,

By its whim, onto these shores of Africa.

I am devout Aeneas, known in heaven.

I saved my household gods and now transport them

To a home in Italy. I descend from high Jove.              380

My goddess mother and the fates have led me.

Of twenty ships launched on the Phrygian sea,

Seven remain—torn by the waves and east wind.

Europe and Asia banished me, to wander

In empty Africa, a needy stranger.”                               385

Venus cut short this grief, these grievances.

“Whoever you might be, it’s by the favor

Of the gods, I think, that you’re alive to reach

This Tyrian city. Go straight to the queen’s house.

I have good news. Your friends and ships are safe.   390

The north wind turned and brought them back. My parents

Taught me to read the sky—I hope correctly.

Look at that cheerful squadron of twelve swans.

Jove’s eagle swooped from heaven through the clear sky

And routed them. But the long row regrouped—     395

Those still aloft look down on those who’ve landed.

Their joyful rushing wings on their return,

Their cries, and their tight circles through the sky

Are like the ships that carry all your people:

Come into port or heading in with full sails.           400

Go on, then, make your way along the road.”

She turned away. Her rosy neck now shone.

Her hair’s ambrosia breathed a holy fragrance.

Her belt fell loose, her robe now swept her feet.

Like a true god she walked. He recognized            405

His mother, and called after her retreat:

“I am your child—must you keep torturing me

With these illusions? Let me take your hand—

Let there be words between us, as we are!”

Bitterly he approached the city walls,                    410

But Venus hid the group in murky air,

In a thick cloud draped over them like clothing.

This way no one could see or touch them. No one

Could ask why they were there or hold them back.

She soared to Paphos in a glad return home         415

To her temple’s hundred altars, warm with incense

From Arabia, and fragrant with fresh garlands.

Meanwhile they hurried, following the path.

They climbed a lofty hill above the city,

And looked down at the fortress straight ahead.          420

Aeneas was amazed at those great structures

Where huts had been: the gates, paved roads—the hubbub!

Some Tyrians feverishly laid out long walls

Or rolled rocks in to raise the citadel;

Others chose sites and bordered them with trenches.      425

Laws, offices, a sacred senate formed.

A port was being dug, the high foundations

Of a theater laid, great columns carved from cliffs

To ornament the stage that would be built there:

Like bees in spring across the blossoming land,            430

Busy beneath the sun, leading their offspring,

Full grown now, from the hive, or loading cells

Until they swell with honey and sweet nectar,

Or taking shipments in, or lining up

To guard the fodder from the lazy drones;                      435

The teeming work breathes thyme and fragrant honey.

“What luck they have—their walls grow high already!”

Aeneas cried, his eyes on those great roofs.

Still covered by the cloud—a miracle—

He went in through the crowds, and no one saw him.    440

Deep in the city is the verdant shade

Where the Phoenicians, tired from stormy waves,

Dug up the sign that Juno said would be there:

A horse’s head, foretelling martial glory

And easy livelihood through future ages.                           445

Dido was building Juno a vast shrine here,

Filled with rich offerings and holy power.

The stairs soared to a threshold made of bronze;

Bronze joined the beams; the doors had shrill bronze hinges.

Here a strange sight relieved Aeneas’ fear                 450

For the first time, and lured him into hope

Of better things to follow all his torments.

While waiting for the queen and looking over

The whole huge temple, marveling at the wealth

It showed, the work, the varied artistry,                   455

He saw Troy’s battles painted in their sequence—

A worldwide story now: the sons of Atreus,

And Priam, and Achilles, cruel to both.

He halted, weeping: “What land isn’t full

Of what we suffered in that war, Achates?              460

There’s Priam! Even here is praise for valor,

And tears of pity for a mortal world.

Don’t be afraid. Somehow our fame will save us.”

With steady sobbing and a tear-soaked face,

He fed his heart on shallow images.                        465

He saw men fight around the citadel—

Trojan troops routing Greeks, crested Achilles

Driving his chariot at the Trojans’ backs.

He wept to recognize, close by, the white tents

Of Rhesus: savage Diomedes stormed                   470

And massacred the camp on its first night,

And seized the ardent horses there before

They tasted Trojan grass or drank the Xanthus.

Here Troilus, wretched boy who’d lost his armor,

And no match for Achilles, sprawled behind        475

His empty chariot and its panicked horses—

Holding the reins. His neck and long hair skidded

Over the ground. His spear point scored the dust.

The Trojan women, hair unbound, went begging

To the temple of implacable Athena.                    480

They took a robe for her and beat their breasts.

She would not raise her eyes and look at them.

Three times Achilles dragged the corpse of Hector

Around Troy’s walls, then traded it for gold.

Aeneas gave a soulful groan to see                       485

His comrade’s armor, chariot, and body,

And Priam stretching out defenseless hands.

He saw himself among Greek chieftains, fighting;

He saw black Memnon and the ranks of Dawn.

Penthesilea, leader of the Amazons                      490

With their crescent shields, was storming through the throng,

Her gold belt tied beneath her naked breast—

This virgin warrior dared to fight with men.

Dardanian Aeneas gazed in wonder,

Transfixed and mesmerized—but while he stood,   495

Dido the lovely queen came to the temple,

Surrounded by a copious troop of soldiers.

Diana on the banks of the Eurotas

Or high on Cynthus, leading dances, followed

By a thousand clustering, trailing nymphs but taller   500

Than all of them, and shouldering her quiver

(Latona in her silent heart rejoices)—

Dido was like her, striding happily

Through her people, planning, urging on her kingdom.

Beneath the vault, before the goddess’ doors,             505

She sat on her high throne, hemmed in by soldiers,

Made laws, gave judgments, and assigned the work

In fair proportions or by drawing lots.

But now Aeneas saw, among a crowd,

Antheus, Sergestus, spirited Cloanthus,                       510

And other Trojans whom the pitch-black whirlwind

Had scattered, driving them to distant shores.

He and Achates both were riveted

With fear and joy. They yearned to clasp their friends’ hands,

But didn’t—they were startled and bewildered.          515

They hung back, watching from the hollow cloud.

What was the news, where were they moored, and why

Had they come here? Spokesmen from every ship

Came clamoring to the shrine with their petition.

When they had entered and had leave to speak,        520

The eldest, Ilioneus, calmly started:

“Your highness, we poor Trojans plead with you:

Jove let you found a city and bring justice

To lawless tribes. We are sea-wandering,

Wind-harried: save our ships from evil fires.              525

Spare decent people—think of what we’ve been through.

We have not come to plunder Libyan homes

Or drive your herds away onto the shore.

Arrogant crime is not for beaten men.

There is a place Greeks call Hesperia,                         530

An ancient land—rich-loamed and strong in war.

Oenotrians lived there, whose descendants called it

Italy, from king Italus, as we’re told.

On our way there,

Stormy Orion heaved the surge against us,               535

Cruel south winds drove us far into the shallows,

Scattered us under conquering waves and over

Rock barriers. We few rowed here to your shores.

What race is this? What nation would permit

Such outrage? They have thrust us from the beach              540

With war and yield no stopping place on land.

You scorn the human race and human weapons?

Be sure the gods remember good and evil.

Aeneas was our leader—none more just

Or faithful ever was, no better warrior.                     545

If fate still lets him breathe instead of sleeping

Among the shades of death, we’d have no fear,

And you would not be sorry for competing

With him in kindness. We have towns and troops, though,

In Sicily. We are kin of great Acestes.                         550

Please let us beach the fleet the winds have ruined,

And saw new planks, shape new oars in your woods.

Perhaps our friends and leader will return—

Then we can sail with joy to Italy.

If that won’t save us, and our loving father               555

Lies in this sea, and there’s no hope of Iulus,

We’ll sail to Sicily—a king, Acestes,

A home is there for us across the strait.”

So Ilioneus spoke, and all the Trojans

Instantly roared approval.                                           560

Dido looked down and gave this brief reply:

“Ease your hearts, Trojans, put away your fears.

The threats to my new kingdom here have forced me

To carefully place guards on all the borders.

Who hasn’t heard about Aeneas’ family,                   565

Or Troy—those brave men and the flames of war?

Phoenicians know the world! This town’s not set

Beyond where the Sun harnesses his horses.

To Saturn’s fields, the great lands of the West,

Or the kingdom of Acestes next to Eryx,                 570

I’ll send you off secure and well-supplied.

Or would you settle here and share my kingdom?

This town I found is yours too. Land your ships.

To me, you will be equal to my own.

I wish the storm had brought your king Aeneas     575

Himself. But I will send some trusted men

Along the shore as far as Libya reaches—

He might be cast up, wandering woods or towns.”

Heartened now, staunch Achates and Aeneas

The patriarch were burning to break free               580

From their cloud. But first Achates asked his leader:

“Goddess’ son, what new thoughts rise up in you?

Your fleet and followers are in safe havens.

Save for one man our own eyes saw the waves

Take under, it is as your mother said.”                     585

He’d scarcely finished when the cloud that veiled them

Ripped apart and dissolved in open air.

Aeneas stood, his godlike face and shoulders

Flashing in clear light, since his mother breathed

Graceful long hair, the blushing glow of youth,    590

And happy, shining eyes onto her son—

Like ivory beautifully carved, like silver

Or marble that is edged with tawny gold.

The queen, the crowd were startled. He addressed them,

Unhesitating: “Here I am, you see—                        595

Trojan Aeneas, saved from Libyan waters.

You are the first to pity Troy’s disasters.

We are the scraps the Greeks left. We have nothing.

Disasters pelted us on land and sea.

It is not in the power of all our people—                600

Who are world-scattered now—to thank you, Dido,

For making us the sharers of this place.

The gods and your own conscience must reward you.

Surely divine powers honor selflessness,

And justice does exist. What happy era                 605

And what outstanding parents gave you birth?

While streams run seaward, while the shadows move

On mountain slopes, and the stars graze in heaven,

Your name will have unceasing praise and honor—

Whatever country calls me.” He clasped hands                         610

With Ilioneus and Serestus, right and left

Then others, brave Cloanthus and brave Gyas.

Phoenician Dido was amazed to see him,

And shocked by all his suffering. She spoke:

“What fate has hounded you through endless dangers?         615

What force has brought you to our savage shores?

Are you the one born by the river Simois—

Trojan Anchises’ and kind Venus’ son?

Teucer in exile came to Sidon, looking

For a new kingdom, I recall, and seeking                                   620

My father Belus’ help, who was away

Ravaging wealthy, newly conquered Cyprus.

Since then I’ve known the tragedy of Troy,

And the Greek kings who fought there, and your name.

Your enemy himself admired Trojans,                                       625

And claimed the ancient “Teucrian” line as his too.

So come now, warriors, join me in my house.

Fate dragged me through much suffering myself

Until it let me settle in this land.

My own experience has taught compassion.”                          630

She spoke, and led Aeneas to her palace,

Proclaiming sacrifices in the temples.

She sent his shore-bound comrades twenty bulls,

A hundred giant boars with bristling backs,

And a hundred fat lambs, and their mothers too,                  635

Gifts for a joyful day.

Her house was now prepared luxuriously

And regally, with a feast laid in the middle,

With embroidered covers and imperial ivory,

Dishes of massive silver, gold-embossed                               640

With heroism through the generations—

The whole long story of her ancient race.

Aeneas, with an anxious father’s love,

Dispatched Achates swiftly to the ships,

To give Ascanius news and bring him here.                           645

To his fond father, he was everything

Aeneas ordered gifts brought in—the salvage

Of Troy: a mantle stiff with gold-stitched figures,

A veil trimmed yellow with acanthus flowers—

Greek Helen’s finery, taken from Mycenae                           650

When she set off for Troy and lawless marriage,

Glorious presents from her mother, Leda—

And the scepter that was held by Ilione,

Eldest of Priam’s daughters; a pearl necklace;

And a crown’s double bands of gold and gems.                   655

Achates rushed to fetch them from the ships.

But a new strategy was in the mind

Of Venus. She sent Cupid in disguise,

Looking like sweet Ascanius, with the gifts,

To twist a frenzied flame around the queen’s bones.         660

She feared this lying race, this doubtful refuge.

At evening, too, came thoughts of ruthless Juno

To trouble her, so she approached winged Love:

“My son, you are my strength, I rule through you.

You even scorn the patriarch’s lightning bolts.                  665

Humbly I come to seek your holy aid.

Your know your brother’s tortuous worldwide voyage,

How Juno’s spite will never let him rest.

You’ve shared my grief about this many times.

Phoenician Dido flatters and detains him.                          670

Juno has sanctioned this; but for what purpose?

She won’t hang back at this decisive time.

So I’ll move quickly, shrewdly, trap the queen

In fire—and then no heavenly will can change her.

She will be mine, through passion for Aeneas.                  675

Now listen while I tell you how to do it.

My darling prince, at his dear father’s call,

Is setting out to the Phoenician city

With gifts saved from the sea and Trojan flames.

I’ll put the boy to sleep and hide him high                        680

On Cythera or Idalium, in my shrine.

He won’t know, he won’t stumble on the scheme.

You are a boy too: for a single night

Impersonate the features Trojans know.

Amid the royal banquet’s flowing wine,                            685

Dido will be enchanted with you, hold you

In her lap, with doting kisses. That’s your chance:

Stealthily breathe on her your flame of poison.”

Love stripped his wings, obeying his dear mother,

And strutted in a gleeful imitation.                                   690

Venus poured deep sleep through the prince’s body

And took him in her arms to the high groves

Of Idalium. Soft marjoram wrapped its flowers,

Its breath of aromatic shade around him.

Now with delight and deference Cupid went                 695

After Achates, with the royal gifts.

He found the queen among her splendid hangings,

Posed in the middle, on a golden couch.

Father Aeneas and the ranks of Trojans

Assembled and lay down on purple covers.                   700

Servants poured water on their hands, provided

Baskets of bread and fine-spun napkins. Inside,

Fifty maids honored household gods with hearth fires

And made the long feast ready course by course.

Two hundred men and women of the same age                 705

Served wine and weighed the tables down with good things.

Phoenician guests flocked in the festive doorway

And took their places on embroidered couches,

Admiring Aeneas’ gifts, admiring Iulus

(Or the god’s bright face and masquerading words)          710

And the cloak and the embroidered yellow flowers.

The Punic queen—cursed and disaster-bound—

Was looking on with hunger in her heart,

Enchanted by the presents and the boy.

He put his arms around Aeneas’ neck—                                715

Which gratified the duped and loving father—

Then sought the queen. Her eyes and mind were fixed

On him. Poor thing, she held him on her lap,

The powerful hidden god. He thought of Venus,

His mother, and began to ease Sychaeus                             720

Out of her mind and try a living love

Against a heart long quiet and disused.

An interval; the tables are removed.

They set out massive wine bowls crowned with flowers.

A clamor rises, and their voices roll                                      725

Through the wide hall. Lamps hang from golden panels,

Blazing, and waxed-rope torches rout the darkness.

The queen called for a bowl—massed gems and gold—

To hold unwatered wine. From Belus onward,

The dynasty had drunk from it. Now, silence.                     730

“Jove, your laws govern visits, as they say.

Make this a glad day for our Trojan guests

And us, a day our children all remember.

Come, Bacchus, giver of joy, and kindly Juno;

Join in this gathering with good will, Tyrians.”                    735

She poured a sacrifice onto the table

And made a start—her lips just brushed the rim—

And passed the bowl to Bitias with a challenge.

He wallowed in the full, foam-brimming gold.

The other leaders drank. Long-haired Iopas,                       740

Great Atlas’ pupil, struck his golden lyre.

He sang the wandering moon, the sun’s eclipses,

Fire and rain, how men and beasts were made,

The Keeper of the Bear, the Twins, the Rain Stars;

Why winter suns dive in the sea so quickly,                         745

What obstacle makes winter nights so slow.

Repeated cheers rose, led by Tyrians.

Unlucky Dido spoke of various things,

Drawing the night out, deep in love already.

She asked so many questions: Priam, Hector,                      750

The armor of the son of Dawn, how good

Diomedes’ horses were, how tall Achilles.

“Tell it from the beginning, friend—the ambush

By the Greeks, your city’s fall, your wanderings.

This is the seventh summer now that sends you                755

Drifting across the wide world’s lands and seas.”

Virgil, and Sarah Ruden. 2008. The Aeneid. 1 online resource (xii, 308 pages) vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=3420452.

If you are interested to read more, follow the link above and look, especially, to Book IV, where we get a really interesting picture of Dido.  All of Sarah Rudens’ translation is available online.

11

Aimee Hinds "Rape or Romance? Bad Feminism in Mythical Retellings"

If you’ve read Madeline Miller’s Circe or Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, you’ll have noticed that reception of classical mythology is taking a turn toward the feminist. Rejecting the misogynistic model presented in the ancient source material and refreshing myths through the lens of otherwise voiceless characters, reception studies are helping to decolonize Classics, providing both a method of questioning classical literature and access to the discipline for those who lack formal Classics education.

But explicitly feminist work dealing with ambiguous women requires a careful hand that, sadly, some of these newer retellings lack. A reception isn’t automatically feminist just because you’ve made women narrate the story, especially not if the story stays the same. The themes that recur in the stories of so many mythological women — from coercion to violent rape — are easily glossed over between translation and retelling. To ignore them or wilfully write them out, as several of these newer “feminist” receptions do, is at best irresponsible, because doing so continues to validate dangerous tropes and leads to actual harm.

Unfortunately, the liminal women of mythology usually don’t get a happy ending. Persephone is doomed to forever vacillate between her abductor/husband in the Underworld and her mother on the fertile earth; there is no escape for her without upsetting the very balance of the seasons. Medusa is fated always to die, a second punishment inflicted by her victim-blamer. Restoring agency to these women doesn’t happen by denying them their trauma, or by removing the label of victim. They enjoy true agency when their authors allow them to rise above their victimhood and become survivors, or at the very least become women who deal with the world on their own terms. True feminist retellings recognize and don’t repress their characters’ liminality.

The poem Persephone to Hades by British-Indian Nikita Gill, from her forthcoming collection Great Goddesses, does not celebrate this liminality. The poem has Persephone thank Hades for recognizing her innate dark power, for lifting her from a fate as a minor goddess to one as a queen. A short proem entitled Conversations with Persephone has a similarly romantic cast. To be clear, Gill’s work is excellent: much of it focuses on subverting misogynistic narratives to reveal women-centric feminist versions. She utilizes classical mythology in several older poems, to powerful, (intersectional) feminist effect. For example, An Older and Wiser Little Mermaid Speaks aligns the fairy tale mermaids with the mythical sirens, giving them back their power through their monstrousness rather than through their fragile femininity.

But Gill’s words about Persephone perplexed me, and I’m not alone. Alongside the poem she had issued a statement, in which she argues that if we remove the possibility for romance in Persephone’s tale, we also remove her agency. Instead, Gill argues, we should “unvictimize” Persephone, because in the sources she is never raped. She ends with this:

Also, this is MYTHOLOGY, not HISTORY. Learn the difference before you go guns blazing into someone’s retelling. We are going to be seeing a lot more retellings from now on from women and I for one couldn’t not be HAPPIER. It’s high time women tell women’s stories.

This statement leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, Nikita Gill is right: the retelling of these stories by women is vital for rehabilitating them. But her take on Persephone is wrong. Persephone is kidnapped and probably raped — it’s right there in our sources. In this instance, while Gill’s reception work is sound (based on her interpretation of the sources), her feminist agenda is misguided. Gill’s poem doesn’t deserve to be policed on the grounds that it changes Persephone’s story, but it does deserve critique for its suppression of themes that have the potential to be problematic today.

To recap the major sources: Persephone is violently forced into a marriage that she very clearly does not desire. Hesiod tells us that she was stolen by Hades; both the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Ovid’s Metamorphosis have Persephone clearly crying out for her mother as she is snatched away (as evinced by the use of the Latin rapio — whence the English “rape”). Ovid tells us of her anguish at the loss of her virginal state.

Despite what to us is clear evidence of rape, in the ancient context there has been no wrongdoing: Hades has been given consent to marry Persephone by her father, Zeus, either preemptively or retroactively. Nevertheless, the story stresses the violent and underhand nature of her abduction. More evidence for the forced sexual elements of Persephone’s myth can be found in her eating of the pomegranate seeds, considered by many to be a euphemism for intercourse (see, for example, Lincoln 1938: 234, Ruis 2015: 24). Different versions of the myth have her secretly forced to eat them, while others show her eating them willingly, but explicitly without knowing that doing so means she will be stuck in the Underworld with her abductor. Although Persephone’s abduction might have been unproblematic in ancient Greece, to tell it as a romance today erases the experiences of both ancient and modern women.

Given her insistence on the absence of sexual abuse in the sources, I emailed Gill to discuss her poem and ask what she’d done to research the story of Persephone. She’d done as much as could be expected, reading Ovid, Homer, Hesiod and Apollodorus — all in translation — as well as reading more modern works such as Robert Graves’ Greek Myths and Stephen Fry’s Mythos. English is Gill’s (self-taught) second language, and she is neither a classicist nor a linguist. Given that languages themselves are already part of a debate on the exclusivity of Classics, we can’t reasonably expect Gill or others to consult texts in their original languages.

Translated versions of ancient texts are crucial for the ongoing inclusivity of Classics. But, as Stephanie McCarter has shown, translation is also crucial for hiding or revealing rape in ancient text, and irresponsible translators have turned sexual abuse into a consensual or even sensual union. McCarter points out David Raeburn’s translation of Metamorphoses as one of those which take the most liberties — and yet it is an extremely popular edition. Raeburn’s translation of Persephone’s abduction makes no mention of her pain or fear of losing her virginity — elements in the original — and instead euphemizes her rape with her torn dress and dropped flowers.

Now, I’m not suggesting that knowing the classical languages automatically equates with a feminist reading — or else we wouldn’t have ended up with bad translations in the first place. Nor does not knowing them mean we don’t need to consider the issues. But knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin does allow the reader to make decisions about meaning, decisions that have already been made for them when reading in translation. When non-specialist writers want to use these texts for reception, it’s unsurprising that even thoughtful feminists can create problematic work, if they are relying on translations that make misogynistic, racist, or even just euphemistic choices.

Gill is already ahead of the curve here; the copy of the Odyssey she consults is the recent translation by Emily Wilson. But without equally progressive translations of other popular texts to consult, creatives are stuck with outdated versions of the myths they are themselves translating into art. Practically, this will often mean translating the meaning of the text rather than the words by rote — the approach taken by Wilson, and championed by Johanna Hanink.

I’ve singled Gill out because her case shows that even those with the best of intentions can unwittingly make a misogynistic mistake. But Gill is far from the only person who has envisioned a romantic element to the myth of Persephone and Hades, nor is she the only person to produce problematic feminist classical reception. Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, while in many ways triumphant in pulling Penelope to the front of the Odyssey, has its own issues rooted in uncritical reworking, not least her absolute refusal to question the role of another ambiguous woman, Helen. Atwood deals excellently with classical reception elsewhere (The Elysium Lifestyle Mansions does for the Cumaean Sibyl what Troy: Fall of a City fails to do for Cassandra), including in The Penelopiad itself. But Atwood’s Helen is thoroughly slut-shamed, gelling too well with misogynistic readings of the Iliad and Odyssey. Like romantic readings of Persephone, it perpetuates problematic and potentially outdated ideas about female sexuality.

These bad takes on Persephone and Helen are not so much failures of feminism as they are illustrations of white feminism: one of the frequent problems in feminist reception. Instead of being refreshing, these versions replicate monolithic and misogynistic mythology. It’s possible to dismiss this replication as a feature, rather than a bug, of white feminism (Atwood has called herself a “bad feminist” when what she really means is a “white feminist”). But I know that Gill is trying to actively work against the misogyny often embodied in white feminism.

The issue with the Persephone poem is not that its author isn’t bothered about looking beyond a feminist agenda for the few. Quite the opposite: during our conversation, Gill made it clear that inclusive and intersectional feminism is her goal. The issue is that feminism alone isn’t enough. Giving active agency to either Helen or Persephone doesn’t empower them, it further muddies the waters of their stories, giving credence to the patriarchal chauvinism of the ancient sources — exactly what Gill is fighting against. To find a good counterexample one need look no further than Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which effectively resolves the two conflicting characterizations of Briseis as enslaved prisoner and willing concubine. It is Briseis’ lack of agency that gives Barker’s retelling its power, rather than the reverse.

If we can’t get cis, white feminism right in reception, then how can we ever hope to get intersectional feminism right? I want to see intersectional feminist reception of classical myths bloom, and to do so — I know I’m preaching to the choir here — we should recognize the need to produce intersectional feminist research and translations. Blame doesn’t lie with Nikita Gill or her poem, it lies with the failure of the discipline of Classics and its unwillingness to disengage with its traditionalist roots. Without decolonization of Classics, we can’t hope to end up with a discipline that strives to be intersectional.

It’s not all bleak: feminist scholarship is being done (for example, Daniel Libatique’s research on Ovid in the #MeToo era); this is a vital part of starting to recognize the subtleties of liminal mythical women. Yet, even with the advent of intersectional feminist research, there is a gap between production and use: unless such research is accessible, aspiring artists will not read it. Through emailing Nikita Gill, I discovered that one of the issues she had was not being able to refer to anything that told her which were the best sources. The answer to this accessibility problem might be as simple as taking ownership of Wikipedia pages or taking action to promote the status of academic blogs as scholarship.

It might look like signposting useful works: Graves’ Greek Myths is problematic and needs to be taken with a whole shaker of salt, but how are non-specialists to know this unless scholars endorse a better and yet still accessible option? Equally, Mary Lefkowitz’s seminal Women in Greek Myth is an influential and relatively accessible piece of feminist scholarship, not yet superseded by any other theoretical feminist work on the same topic. Yet it is undeniably a piece of white feminist scholarship, woefully inadequate for informing intersectional feminist work.

This is not to say that every feminist retelling of myth fails in its feminism: Madeline Miller’s Circe and Anwen Hayward’s Here, the World Entire are both very good examples of intersectional feminist retellings of myths that don’t sacrifice the ambiguity or liminality of their characters. Hayward’s novella, a semi-autobiographical retelling of the Medusa myth, is particularly successful, not only entirely decentering Perseus but also allowing for Medusa’s existence outside the “classical” world. My only quibble with Miller is her falter in the novella Galatea, where, despite her background as a linguist, she doesn’t question Pygmalion’s statue’s traditional name, ignoring the connotations of the statue’s whiteness that, along with the name, are products of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and have little to do with the myth in its ancient forms.

Both authors are classicists: Miller has a BA and MA in Ancient Greek and Latin, which she also teaches, while Hayward is currently pursuing a PhD in classical reception, and wrote Here, the World Entire after doing an MA in Myth and Narrative Theory. Miller has the tools to be able to read and make those translation decisions about the ancient sources, and Hayward’s specialist training in myth and narrative (her MA thesis was on the ways myths are reappropriated) gives her the tools to be able to use myth critically in her work.

I should stress that neither author’s work ought to be considered more authoritative than any other piece of reception in its use of classical mythology. But I do think that such work can be, especially for non-specialists who are also doing reception work, especially useful as a type of public scholarship. Non-specialists who wish to use research can only work with what we give them, and our own reception — where it is feminist, and intersectional — might prove a useful starting point.

Mythology, by its very nature as something that is mutable over time, needs us to take into account its multiplicity, and not to shy away from its ugly aspects. When artists do not address the problematic themes like sexual abuse in the myths they use, they potentially do lasting damage as their own work becomes part of the corpus on that particular myth. These issues have real world consequences, reinforcing rape culture: only 2% of rape reports end in prosecution in the UK, Brett Kavanaugh is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in the US, Brock Turner’s reputation is deemed more important than the trauma of his victims. I could go on. We can’t let tired old myths about rape, abuse and women’s bodies continue to be perpetuated. And so as classicists, we can’t shy away from the ugliness in mythology either, because we can, through our work, reveal that ugliness to others.

Classics has work to do. Reception can’t fix its problems alone, and Nikita Gill sums it up best when she says that women’s stories have been told by men in a misogynistic time. That time is still now, and it’s up to us to do something about it.

Aimee Hinds is an independent scholar from the UK. She can be found buying books, drinking tea, or both. With special thanks to Nikita Gill, Anwen Hayward, Ellie Mackin-Roberts, and Adrian Earle.

https://eidolon.pub/rape-or-romance-1b3d584585b8

12

OPTIONAL: Richlin, Amy. 1992: "Reading Ovid's Rapes"

You are the inspiration.for a poet, he seemed to say. If you think you are being spied on, tell your parents. They will think you are silly and hysterical. They will tell you how great art is made.

-Laurie Colwin, “A Girl Skating” (1982)

He gives kisses to the wood; still the wood shrinks from his kisses. To which Apollo said: “But since you will not be able to be my wife, you will surely be my tree.”

-Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.556-58 (Apollo and Daphne)

I don’t particularly want to chop up women but it seems to work.

-Brian De Palma (quoted in Pally 1984)

A woman reading Ovid faces difficulties. In the tradition of Western literature his influence has been great, yet even in his lifetime critics found his poetry disturbing because of the way he applied his wit to unfunny circumstances. Is his style a virtue or a flaw? Like an audience watching a magician saw a lady in half, they have stared to see how it was done. I would like to draw attention to the lady.

Consider Ovid’s Metamorphoses, cast as a mythic history of the world: more than fifty tales ofrape in its fifteen books (nineteen to]g at some length). Compare his Fasti, a verse treatment of the Roman religious calendar: ten tales of rape in six books. These vary in their treatment; some are comic. In general, critics have ignored them, or traced their literary origins, or said they stood for something else or evidenced the poet’s sympathy with women.

But we must ask how we are to read texts, like those of Ovid, that take pleasure in violence-a question that challenges not only the canon of Western literature but all representations. If the pornographic is that which converts living beings into objects, such texts are certainly pornographic. Why is it a lady in the magician’s box? Why do we watch a pretended evisceration? [158]

Critical Orientation

Before beginning to analyze the text, I offer some cautions and a theoretical framework.

Problems in writing:

(1) The text I am writing is metapomography and partakes of the same subject-object relationship, the same “gaze,” that structures its object.

(2) Similarly, criticism and theory have been tools of the patriarchy and may not be useful toward subversion (see Jehlen 1981; E. Kaplan 1983: 313; Lorde 1984).

(3) To write about Ovid keeps the focus on the male writers of the canon. But this doesnot excltde ancient women (pace Culham 1990): the nature of Ovid’s rapes surely bears on the lives of the women who heard his poems and live(d) in the sign system that produced the canon. And one option is to do the best we can with the tools and materials at hand.

My goals are to hold up the content of some canonical texts to a political scrutiny and to suggest a theoretical model that enables escape from the trap of representation in the hierarchy.
Axioms: Content is never arbitrary or trivial; content is not an accident of a text but an essential. A text about rape may also be about something else, but it is still a text of rape. A seductive treatment is standard equipment for any fantasy; stylistic analysis does not replace content analysis and, in fact, leaves us to explain what that style is doing on that content, like a bow on a slaughterhouse.

Moreover, there is a reciprocal relationship between the content of the text and the lives of the text’s consumers. Stylistic beauties serve to expedite the absorption of content by the audience, though the narrative structure directs audiences even without the stylistic adornment of high-culture texts-tragedy is to weep at, comedy is to laugh at, and so on. To resist the direction of narrative because of content is to break the rules; but such a breakdown in the perpetual motion of text and life is possible. For example, here, even in the thick of metapomography.

Otherwise my theoretical framework is fourfold:

Rereading in the Classics

As its name suggests, Classics is not wide open to the idea of a re-formation of the canon. This has been true even for feminists in the field (see analysis in Skinner 1986, 1987a, 1987b). So even recent studies of Ovid by feminists (Myerowitz 1985; Verducci 1985) have kept their eyes focused on the magician rather than the lady; others have set out to absolve the poet of his apparent fexism, concentrating on the distinction between poet and persona and the effect this has on the message of the text (Cahoon 1985; Hemker 1985).

But these readings join the magician’s act as he saws away. Erased from the field of vision: the price of admission, the place of male and female onstage, the experience of the magician’s assistant, the voyeurism and gaze of the audience, the motivation of the magician himself, the blood that is not really dripping from the box. In order to confront the canon and explain what is going on in Ovid’s act, we need other ways of reading. [159]

Feminism For and Against Pornography

The feminist controversy over the nature and danger (or use) of pornography contributes a basis for a political critique of texts like Ovid’s. The argument against pornography holds that the common images of women contribute to the oppression of women (e.g., S. Griffin 1981; Lederer 1980; see Echols 1983); the argument in favor of pornography has highlighted sadomasochism, both in fantasy and in reality, as a valid sexual mode, and/or claimed that violent images are cathartic and/or not harmful. The nonjudgmental stance coincides with the anthropologist’s and the classicist’s yearning for objectivity. But these arguments again elide some questions. Why should sexuality and violence be so commonly connected? Represented? Can a p􀀷rson have a right to be physically abused? Is violence inevitable and uncontrollable? Do cultural or historical differences excuse anything?

Fantasy and Representation

Theories of representation, starting with the formulation of the gaze as male, trace the link between gender and violence (esp. Berger 1972; E. Kaplan 1983; de Laure tis 1984 ). Studies sometimes claim that the explicit content of a fantasy is not its meaning. Here, as E. Ann Kaplan has noted (1983: 320), there is a danger of losing sight of content altogether: “If certain feminist groups (i.e., Women Against Pornography) err on the side of eliding reality with fantasy .. . , feminist [literary] critics err on the side of seeing a world constructed only of signifiers, of losing contact with the ‘referred’ world of the social formulation.”

Thus, analysis of Ovid’s rapes as figures of the artist’s predicament dodges the questions of why rape is the figure of choice and what its effects might be on its audience.

Questions of complicity and origin arise in any discussion of culturewide fantasy. What of the women in the audience? Is there a female gaze? Is gaze itself gendered, in a way separate from social gender? Whose idea is it to saw a lady in half? Can specifically female fantasies be isolated? (This critique dates bcick to Mary Wollstonecraft.) It is possible to trace historical change (see, e.g., Thurston 1987); still, within the closed system of the patriarchy (Lorde’s “master’s house”), women, as a muted group (Ardener 1975), can speak audibly only in the master’s language, whether or not their speaking transmutes the language (as claimed, e.g., by Maclean 1987; see Elsom, Montague, and Marsh in this volume).

Yet if, with the most radical critiques, we say “Art will have to go” (Kappeler 1986), where do we go? The problem here is the gap between our ability to analyze the problem and our ability to realize a solution.

Gender and Reading

Feminist literary criticism endeavors, in part, to come to grips with problems of gender and reading (so also Gubar 1987). Two of its strategies-canon reformation and appropriation-are particularly pertinent to reading Ovid.

As Teresa de Lauretis says (1984: 107), “any radical critique [entails] a reread- [160] ing of the sacred texts against the passionate urging of a different question, a different practice, and a different desire.” Feminist critics advise readers to resist the text (Fetterley 1978), to read against the text, to misread or reread the text (Kolodny 1985), to reject the canon of Western literature and make a new one, or end canons altogether (Fetterley 1986; Kolodny 1985; Showalter 1985: 19-122). Three things to do with a lot of male-based texts: throw them out, take them apart, find femalebased ones instead. (This critique goes back to A Room of One’s Own.)

Another approach is of special interest; our prefeminist sisters had it as their only option (other than silence or co-optation). This is the appropriation of malebased texts; becoming, in Claudine Herrmann’s phrase, voleuses de langue, “women thieves of language” (or “of the tongue”), taking myths and reseeing them (Ostriker 1985). As it happens, a myth of Ovid’s has seemed important to steal: Philomela, raped, her tongue cut out, weaving her story to her sister who had thought her dead; Philomela, who may have become the nightingale. Her story has been claimed by a male critic as the voice of poetry and reclaimed by a feminist as a paradigm of woman writer and reader (Joplin 1985); claimed by Virginia Woolf in Between the Acts and reclaimed by her feminist reader (Marcus 1983, 1984). The misreading of texts here is deliberate, heroic; as Patricia Joplin says (1985), “we have a rescue to perform. Those who gave us the sad news that we had no sister lied to us.” But we realize just how heroic an act the rescue of myths must be when we look at how Philomela and her sisters are known to us.

Gazing at the Text

Texts are inseparable from their cultures, and so, before looking at Ovid’s rapes, we need a context. We know that Ovid was a popular writer; law students emulated his rhetorical tricks, schoolboys read his stories (Bonner 1949; 1977: 217). How might Ovid’s rapes have fit in with the cultural experience of his audience?

We know that great numbers of people attended theatrical shows and wild beast “games” that exhibit some of the same traits as Ovid’s writing: portrayal of sexual scenes from Greek myth, especially in the polymorphous theater of the pantomime (Beare 1955); savage and gruesome deaths (Hopkins 1983, Barton 1989). Wealthy people had representations of such scenes in their houses (see Myerowitz and Brown in this volume). The practice cases of the rhetorical schools where Ovid was trained often dealt with rape and violence (Bonner 1949). Roman humor is full of rape; a series of first-century jokes focuses on the god Priapus, who graphically threatens male and female thieves with rape (Richlin 1983). And from Pompeii have been recovered phallic wind chimes, birdbaths, statues of Priapus, phallic paving stones (Grant 1975). Roman law on rape was ill defined, real cases rarely attested, and the victim was blamed (Dixon 1982; Gardner 1986; see Joshel, Chapter 6 above). All slaves were, more or less, the sexual property of their owners; on the other hand, in Ovid’s Rome the new emperor Augustus was attempting to reform family life among the aristocracy (Richlin 1981).

Ovid’s rapes play a significant role in his work. He was the last great Augustan poet, having outlived his more conventional coevals, and he wrote prolifically; here [161] will look at sections of only three of his works, though my analysis could well be extended. In the Metamorphoses, rape keeps company with twisted loves, macabre and bloody deaths, cruel gods, cataclysms of nature (the Flood, Phaethon’s fire), wars, and, of course, grotesque transformations. Rapes (some Ovid’s) fill Arachne’s tapestry in Book 6, and, like threads in a tapestry, the themes in the poem run in and out of sight; sometimes a horror in a half-line, sometimes half a book, sometimes gone. The rapes in the Fasti adorn the etiologies of Roman religious festivals, while the two in the Ars Amatoria contrast with the normal suavity of the narrator’s advice. But the poems overall share a certain point of view, and the rapes capture its essence.

The Metamorphoses: Rapes and Transformations

DAPHNE’S FEARFUL BEAUTY

The attempted rape of Daphne by Apollo, one of Ovid’s best-known passages, is almost the first event in the poem after the Flood. At once the narrative directs the reader’s gaze. Daphne begins the episode as a nymph and ends as a laurel tree; in between, she flees from the god, who appears ridiculous and fails to rape Daphne as a nymph (though he has his way with her as a tree). But look at Daphne in her flight (1.525-30):

As he was about to say more, the daughter of Peneus, with timid pace, flees him, and leaves his uncompleted speech, along with him. Even then she looked [literally visa (est), “was seen”] pretty; the winds laid bare her body,
and the breezes as she met them fluttered her clothing as it came against them, and the light breeze made her locks go out behind her, and her beauty [forma] was increased by her flight. 1

Indeed, your looking at her is the point. Does the fact that the narrator’s voice is not identical with the voice of the historical Ovid undercut this? Is this the point of view only of the buffoonish god? Hardly; glazed thinly, if at all, by its literary mechanisms, there is Daphne’s body. Ovid liked this trick; he says of Leucothoe during her rape, “fear itself became her” (M. 4.230); of Europa, “and fear itself was a cause of new beauty” (Fasti 5.608); of the Sabines, “and fear itself was able to adorn many of them” (Ars Amatoria 1.126); of Lucretia, spied on by her future rapist, “this itself was becoming: her chaste tears became her” (Fasti 2. 757). And the display of the woman’s body and fear to her rapist-to-be (and reader) often precedes her rape; Arethusa, who flees her rapist naked, is made to testify: “because I was naked, I looked readier for him” (5.603). Curran (1984) has argued that the narrator’s consciousness of the victims’ fear shows his empathy for them; but surely the narrator stresses how visually attractive the disarray of flight, and fear itself, made the victim (see Joshel, Chapter 6 above).

PHILOMELA’S TONGUE

Like R-rated movies, Ovid’s rapes are not sexually explicit. But no such limits hamper the poem’s use of violence, which sometimes stands in for the sexual, as [162] most vividly in the story of Philomela (M. 6.424-674; see Galinsky 1975: 110-53).

Ovid begins the tale when Procne, daughter of the king of Athens, marries the barbarian Tereus. They go off to Thrace, and Procne duly bears a baby boy, Ity s. Five years pass; then Procne wants to see her sister, Philomela. Tereus goes down to Athens to fetch her, gazes at her, and lusts after her; he wishes he were Philomela’s father, so he could fondle her (475-82); and he fantasizes about the body that lies beneath her clothes (490-93). He then takes her back to Thrace, but not to her sister; in a hut in the woods, he rapes her. Here Phiiomela is a rabbit to Tereus’s eagle (note esp. 518: “there is no flight for the one captured, the captor [raptor] watches his prize”). Moreover, she is grammatically passive, while Tereus is grammatically active. He is the subject of all the verbs, she is the object, except where the verbs signify fear (e.g., “she trembles,” 527). The rape itself takes two and a half lines and is indeed inexplicit; though when Philomela is next compared to an animal, she is a lamb wounded by the wolf’s mouth, a dove with feathers bloodied by greedy talons. We are reminded that she had been a virgin.

After the rape, Philomela makes a long and rhetorically polished speech, and Tereus’s fear and anger at her threats are so strong that he cuts out her tongue (549- 60):

After the wrath of the wild tyrant was stirred up by such words,
no less his fear, spurred on by either cause,
he frees from its sheath the sword with which he was girt,
and he forces her, having been grasped by the hair, with her arms bent
behind her back,
to suffer bonds; Philomela was readying her throat
and had conceived a hope of her own death once she had seen the sword; he, as  was reproaching and calling out on the name of “father”
and struggling to speak, having been grasped by the forceps,
ripped out her tongue with wild sword; the utmost root of the tongue flickers,
[] self  lies and, trembling, mutters into the dark earth,
and as the tail of a mutilated snake will jump,
[] quivers, and, dying, seeks the trail of [] mistress.

Tereus’s first action after the rape (551) is to remove his sword from its sheath; an action parallel to the rape is about to take place. But here we get details not given for the rape, with a list of further actions-by, as we gradually discover, three actors: Tereus, Philomela (who only bares her neck and hopes for death), and Philomela’s tongue. All the verbs and participles from j.t;5 on of which Tereus is the subject take a single object, heralded by a remarkable cluster of modifiers: “reproaching” (555), “calling out” (555), “struggling to speak” (556), “having been grasped by the forceps” (556). The surprise here is that the postponed object (indicated by [] in the text) is not Philomela, as the feminine modifiers lead the reader to expect, but linguam, “tongue” (556)-a feminine noun that here stands in for the feminine victim both grammatically and literally.

The point of view now switches vividly to that of the tongue itself: 558, ipsa iacet, “herself, she lies there” (like a person, a victim of violence); 558, terraeque tremens inmurmurat atrae (the tongue itself makes its own speech; note the effect of the repeated t’s and r’s, sounds made with the tongue); 560, “she quivers” (recall- [163] ing, with “trembling”[558] the verbs of earlier clusters associated with Philomela [522-23, 527-30].  Finally, dying as Philomela cannot, the tongue like the snake’s tail seeks the body of which once had been a part.

What are we to make of “muttering into the dark earth” and the comparison to a snake? This image complex is more familiar from the Eumenides-a woman, the earth, darkness, the snake (often opposed as a sign to the eagle, here associated with Tereus). Earlier, Procne’s marriage had been attended by the Furies; later, the two sisters turn into Fury-like creatures (esp. 595, 662). The “dark earth” tallies with the dark night within human beings (472-74, 652) and with the locus of the crimes committed in this tale-against Philomela in the hut in the deep forest, and soon against ltys in tbe depths of the house (638; cf. 646 , “the innards of the house [penetralia] drip with gore”). The simile, so close to her mutilation, surprises us with a new view of Philomela-a snake rather than a lamb or dove.

Is the text shifting its sympathies? The end of the tale bears out this suggestion. Tereus keeps Philomela shut up in the hut, and rapes her occasionally, for a year. Philomela cleverly weaves an account of her experience and sends the weaving to her sister via a servant. Procne, reading Philomela’s web as a “pitiable poem” about “her own” lot (see Gamel n.d.), rescues Philomela and plans a way to get back at Ter.eus: the two sisters will butcher Procne’s son Itys, cook him, and serve him to Tereus for dinner. (When they seize ltys, the poet describes him with an object cluster [639-40] like the ones he used of Philomela, and her tongue, earlier.) When Tereus discovers what has happened, he calls on the vipereas sorores, the “snaky sisters” (i.e. the Furies; 662) and jumps at the two sisters before him with his sword: they tum into birds with marks of blood on their feathers, while he turns into a bird with a spearlike bill.

Ovid’s story of Philomela has been construed as a sympathetic and accurate picture of a rape and its aftermath, and of a reading of one woman’s plight by a sister woman (Curran 1984; Bergren 1983; cf. Gamel n.d.; Joplin 1985; Marcus 1983, 1984). But something else is going on here. Ovid has shifted the focus of dramatic attention in this tale forward off the rape and backward off the metamorphosis, onto the scene of the cutting out of Philomela ‘s tongue. Is it decorum that makes the poet omit the details of the rape? If so, it is a decorum that allows him to show us what the inside of her mouth looks like with the tongue cut out of it. This is a conflation of violence with sex.

The cutting out of Philomela’s tongue is the sort of set piece that was increasingly to characterize Latin literature in the first century A.D. (G. Williams 1978: 184-92). Her unexpectedly eloquent speech immediately after her rape, which seems to make the mutilation such a comment on speech and gender, is also the kind of anomaly Ovid plays with elsewhere; for example, Latona’s speech to the farmers when she is too thirsty to speak (M. 6.349-59) or the speech of the satyr Marsyas as he is being flayed (M. 6. 385-86). I echo the critics who quote Dryden’s comment: “If this were Wit, was this a Time to be witty, when the poor wretch was in the Agony of Death?” (Galinsky 1975: 77n, 132-33; Gamel n.d.: n. 17). But the very source of this wit is the delighted incongruity of clever style with gruesome subject matter (cf. Verducci 1985).

The bodies of Philomela, Marsyas, and many others feed the magician’s box. [164] This poetry depends for its elegant existence on the exposure of violence (the flaying of Marsyas, the opening of Philomela’s mouth).

MYRRHA’S BODY

The cutting out of Philomela’s tongue is a transformative point iQ. the tale, turning her from object of violence to perpetrator; her literal metamorphosis at the end is abrupt and relatively unstressed. But Philomela’s mutilation has much in common with the metamorphoses suffered by many victims in the poem (mostly female); for example, Daphne into laurel, Io into a cow, Callisto into a bear, Actaeon into a stag, Arachne into a spider, and many into trees (Phaethon’s sisters, Dryope, Myrrha), pools (Cyane, Arethusa, Byblis), and statues (Phineus’s men, Niobe). All lose the ability to speak with a human voice; if they have been turned into animals, their efforts to speak, resulting in grunts, and their horror at this, are recounted. A· favorite tactic of the poet’s is to trace the metamorphosis step by slow step, particularly horrible in the case of Myrrha, whose metamorphosis into a tree encases her pregnant belly in wood (10.489-513): roots burst through her toenails, her skin “hardens with bark” (494), she voluntarily sinks her face into the uprush of wood ( 497-98), but her pregnancy advances and the birth splits her open, nor has she a voice with which to cry out (503-13). In the similar transformations of Phaethon’s sisters and Dryope, one mother tries to pull the tree off her daughters and can only mutilate them (2.345-63); another, having herself unwittingly enacted a like mutilation (9.344-45), feels her breasts harden to her nursing child (9.349-93).

So the metamorphosis of women can be something special. In some cases, their previous beauty is grotesquely disfigured, and just those details are given that drive this home in Roman terms (Callisto’s hairy arms, Io’s comic bovine grin). In many cases, illicit sexuality is the catalyst for metamorphosis, and whereas a rape is normally not explicitly described, the text makes up for this in the metamorphosis. It is as if there were an analogic or developmental relationship between rape and mutilation. Indeed, several women are transformed as a punishment for their rape (Io, Callisto, Medusa), and two are killed outright by their angry fathers (Leucothoe, Perimele).

The place of rape in Ovid’s texts is thus one where pleasure and violence intersect. Fear is beautiful; violence against the body stands in for rape.

SALMACIS’ S DESIRE

The only rape scene in the Metamorphoses that involves explicit phy ical contact also involves a major role reversal: the rape of Hermaphrditus, a beautiful boy of fifteen, by the naiad Salmacis (4.285-388). Her proposition to him makes him blush, “and to have blushed became him” (330)-fear again beautiful, here at some length (331-33). Salmacis then spies on the boy as he first dips his toes in her pool, then strips; her voyeurism here (340-55) rivals that of Tereus.

Bathing scenes recur as incitements to lust in the poem (see esp. Arethusa); they combine the innocence and tempting solitude of other favorite settings ( picking flowers, sitting on the riverbank, wandering on the beach) with an opportunity to show the body naked. Here both raped and (female) rapist strip down. Indeed, the passage overdetermines Salmacis’s desire and marks its abnormality: not only she [166] but her eyes bum, and they bum like the sun (Phoebus, a familiar rapist in the poem) reflected in a mirror, opposita … imagine (“with opposed image,” 349). She is a looking-glass rapist. The boy is compared (354-55) to an ivory statue or white lilies; her likenesses are not so nice. In a switch on the usual comparison of rapist to eagle or wolf, Salmacis is compared to a snake attacking an eagle and (unique in the poem) to an octopus (361-64, 366-67).

The result of this rape is twofold: Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, in response to
a prayer of hers, become joined into one creature, a hermaphrodite, who speaks
with the boy s (dismayed) consciousness; and he prays that the pool will henceforth turn any man who swims in it into a semivir, a “half-man” or eunuch (386), and gets his wish. Salmacis’s consciousness is gone-the answer to her prayer?

Other women in the Metamorphoses pursue men out of excessive desire (the maenads, Byblis, Myrrha, Circe), never with good results. But here the poet experiments with a female who has all the trappings of the most forceful rapist, and the interchange of roles here results in a permanent and threatening confusion of gender. We will see male rapists who dress as women, even a male raped because he is dressed as a woman, and these events turn out well; when a female acts male, the result is the unmanning of all men, and the narrative makes it clear that this is a bad thing (e.g., 4.285-86). A character in Book 12 shows what is at stake: Caenis, raped by Neptune and given a wish in return, replies (12.201-3):

This injury produces a great wish
now to be able to suffer/take in [pati] no such thing; give that I not be a
woman-
you will have given everything.

In the world of the Metamorphoses, a sensible request. As we will see, to try on a female role is important for Ovid; but that role, like the trying on, has its limits.

Rapes in the Ars Amatoria

It has been argued that the two scenes of rape in the light, witty Ars reflect Ovid’s knowing use of an unreliable narrator, the praeceptor amoris (“teacher of love”), and that these scenes represent love that the praeceptor deplores (Myerowitz 1985: 66) or. the poet rejects (Hemker 1985). If so, how is it that he has used the same voice in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti as well? At least it is safe to say the poet found this sensibility congenial.

The poem’s attitude toward women has well been described as desirous of control (Myerowitz 1985; see Parker and Myerowitz in this volume). In this setting, we find the rape of the Sabines and the tale of Achilles and Deidamia, texts that share with the rapes of the Metamorphoses the content that lies between the brackets of narratorial persona.

THE RAPE OF THE SABINES (AA. 1. 99-134)

At 1. 99, the praeceptor sets up his account of the incident, so hallowed a part of Roman history, in terms of his own present and of the gaze. Women, he claims, now come to the theater to watch and be watched. The tale of the Sabines is adduced as [167] an aition (origin story) for this putative phenomenon; the setting of the rape in the theater is Ovid’s innovation and suggests he is not just telling a story but staging a scene here. At 109, the praeceptor begins his description of the mass kidnapping:

[Romulus’s men] look about, and each marks for himself with his eyes thegirl
whom he wants, and with silent breast they ponder many things.
[And while the performance was going on onstage, as the audience began to
applaud,] the king gave the awaited signal of booty to the people.
At once they leap up, professing their intention by shouting,                                                  and they lay desirous hands on the maidens.
As doves, a most timid throng, flee eagles,
and as the little new lamb flees the wolves once seen,
so they feared the men rushing without restraint;
the same color that had been before remained in no one of them. For there was one fear, not one face of fear:
some tear their hair, some sit without sense;
one, sad, is silent, in vain another calls her mother;
this one complains, that one is stupefied; one stays, another flees; the captured [raptae] girls are led, a marital booty,
and fear itself was able to adorn many of them.
If any of them had fought back too much and denied her companion,
the man picked her up himself, held to his desirous breast,
and thus he spoke: “Why do you ruin your tender little eyes with tears?
What your father is to your mother, this I will be to you.”
Romulus, you alone knew how to give bonuses to your soldiers;
if you give bonuses like that to me, I’ll be a soldier.

As in the Philomela episode, the men are here subjects of action verbs, especially of the gaze (109); the women begin as objects of action. This situation is reversed from 117-26, but, like Philomela, they act only to show fear. The simile of doves and lambs is similarly familiar, and was in fact a commonplace; so for Lucretia in the Fasti (below), and in Horace, Epodes 12.25-26 (a cross-sex trav􀀂 esty) and Odes 1.23 (to “Chloe”; see Montague, Chapter 11 in this volume). In the climax of the scene (121-26), the narrator sketches the crowd of girls in a series of short subject-verb clauses. But the summary subject-“girls”-is in apposition with a concrete noun-“marital booty” (125)-and what actions these women perform again only mark their vulnerability.

These clauses are remarkable in the Latin for the neatness of their construction, one figure balanced against the next by parison, chiasmus, and asyndeton, in the smallest possible space-Ovidian prestidigitation. By their brevity they achieve the effect of a miniature, with little figures mouthing inaudible cries and stamping inaudible feet. But we do not have to rely on aesthetics for a reading of the passage; the narrator tells us: “And fear itself was able to adorn many of them” (126)-the voice of the praeceptor, but also, as we have seen, that of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti.

At 127, the possibility of fighting back is conceded, but the man’s action and speech are indulgent, amatory, and paternalistic (128-30). He marks only her tears, [167] annulling her resistance; carrying her off like a child, he talks of her “tender little eyes,” as the poet Catullus did to his mistress in a poem where she weeps over a dead sparrow (c. 3).

Once again the narrator tells us how to read this, declaring that he would volunteer as a soldier himself if he could get such a reward (131-32)-recalling Ovid’s beloved metaphor, militat omnis amans, “every lover is a soldier” (see Cahoon 1988). But metaphors often convey a literal perception, and a poet who sees love as comparable to battle might well see violence as part of love.

Remarkably, a recent critic sees this passage as a strong antirape statement by Ovid (Hemker 1985). The premise of the argument is that the praeceptor is so obvious! y wrongheaded that the reader sees the falsity of all he says, as if the whole poem were in quotation marks and the quotation marks nullified the content. Yet Hemker simultaneously argues that Ovid’s description “sympathetically conveys the horror of the situation”; she singles out the climactic vignette of the women in flight as showing “the women’s perspective” (45).

Such a reading blurs content; the women’s fear is displayed only to make them more attractive. We have this myth, too, in comedies and action romances (squeaky voice: “Put me down!”); it is part of the plot. Likewise, for the Sabine women, there is really nothing to be worried about, because they are getting married. Their fears are cute (see Modleski 1982: 46), and the whole thing is a joke. Again the text uses women’s fear as its substance (and see Myerowitz 1985 on the female as materia in the Ars). There are indeed quotation marks around the text, the marks that tell the reader ·’this is amusing”; but they act not to attack the content but to palm it off.

ACHILLES AND DEIDAMIA (AA 1.663-705)

Toward the end of Book 1 of the Ars Amatoria, the praeceptor illustrates his contention that no means yes (663-80) by telling the story of Achilles and Deidamia. He first suggests the lover should mix kisses with his wheedling words (663), whether or not the woman wishes to give them (664). If she fights and calls the lover “naughty” (665), nevertheless “she wants herself to be conquered in fighting” (666). A man who has taken kisses and not “other things” (669) was not worthy even to get the kisses (670). Once he got the kisses, how close he was to his “full desire” (671); such hesitance was not pudor (“modesty/chastity”) but rusticitas ( “country-bumpkin-ness”), the praeceptor’s bane (672). Then he generalizes (673-78):

you may call it vis [rape/force]; that vis is pleasing to girls;
“unwilling,” they often wish to have given “what helps” [a euphemism].
Whatever woman is violated by the sudden seizing of Venus [ = sex],
rejoices, and “naughtiness” serves as a gift/does them a favor.
But a woman who has departed untouched, when she could have been
forced,
though she simulates gladness with her face, will be sad.

Women’s emotions are consistently unreal throughout this passage-“unwilling” (674) must describe a feigned emotion; “naughtiness” (676) must be feigned [168] scolding as in 665; even their facial expressions are artificial (678). The pupil is to believe that women do have emotions with which to enjoy .the experience, but there is apparently no way to tell for sure. What does a woman want? The deletion of women’s voice here is even more thorough than in the tale of Philomela.

The praeceptor, skimming over the rape of the Leucippidae (see Sutton, Chapter 1 above), then launches into his illustrative set piece. Having delineated the beginning of the Trojan War in six lines, he takes the same time to show us the young Achilles in drag, disguised as a girl on the island of Skyros. And he is in drag when he becomes a rapist. He is put in to room with the royal princess, “by chance” (697), and-voila!-haec ilium stupro comperit esse virum, “she knew him to be a man by means of rape” (698), stuprum apparently the acid test. The praeceptor goes on to hint that it was no rape at all (699), saying that she desired it (700) and begged Achilles, now in armor and hurrying off to war, to stay (701-4). Vis ubi nunc ilia est? he asks, smirking-“Where’s that ‘rape’ now, eh?” (703). He concludes, “You see, as it’s a matter of pudor for her to begin certain things first, thus it’s pleasing to her to undergo them (pati) when another begins” (705-6). His point is that pati— “to suffer,” “to be passive,” “to be penetrated sexually” –is pleasing to women, and this is the mark of the woman, as vis, “force,” is the mark of the man (see Parker, Chapter 5 above). When we want to know the gender of the adolescent hero dressed in women’s clothing, the signifier of his maleness is his ability to commit rape. (Ovid was to repeat the idea of transvestite rape several times in the Metamorphoses [4.217-33, 11.310, 14.654-771]; see esp. 2.433, where Jupiter disguised as Diana embraces Callisto and nec se sine crimine prodit– does not thrust out/ reveal himself without crime”; gender revelation equals penetration.)

These two passages from the Ars Amatoria show both enjoyment of women’s fear and objectification of women. Whereas pati is repugnant to men, here pati is women’s nature, and they enjoy it (but contrast Caenis). As in New Comedy (Fantham 1975), the outcome of rape is happy. This idea also appears in the Metamorphoses, for example, for Orithyia and Boreas, immediately after Philomela; they marry, and Orithyia has twins (see Modleski 1982: 35). And it appears in the Fasti as well. But note again the intersection of pleasure with violence, now with fun in place of pain (Richlin 1983: 156-58). The erasure of female subjectivity is complete; the poem presents the female reader with no exit (Richlin 1984).

Rape in the Fasti: Comic Relief

The rapes in the Fasti are a mixed bag. Three (1.391-440, Priapus and Lotis; 2.303-58, Faunus and Omphale/Hercules; 6.319-48, Priapus and Vesta) are comic: a rustic and ithyphallic god attempts to rape a nymph/ Amazon/ goddess in her sleep and is interrupted in comic fashion before he succeeds. Three (5.193-206, Chloris and Zephyr; 5.603-20, Europa and Jupiter; 6.101-28, Crane and Janus) emphasize the fortunate outcome: Chloris marries Zephyr and becomes the goddess Flora, Europa gives her name to a continent, Janus gives Crane a goddess’s power over all house boundaries. One (2.583-616, Mercury and Lara) stems from a punishment but also ends well, since Lara gives birth to twins. Finally, three are [169] “historic”: the stories of Lucretia (2.723-852), Rhea Silvia (3.11-48), and the Sabine women, part II (3.187-234). Rhea Silvia and Lucretia, like the comic victims, are asleep as their rapists approach (cf. in the Metamorphoses only Thetis-who, however, also has to be tied down-and Chione); Lara is mute, and Lucretia is repeatedly said to be dumbstruck. Crane and Lara gain through rape the guardianship of boundaries; Chloris/Flora gives Juno the power to bear a child without a father. Common elements are the powerlessness of the women and the potential for unlocking that results from their penetration; hence the catalytic function of the historical women (see Joshel, Chapter 6 above). Like the Virgin Mary, they are lowly creatures whose very humility and penetration foster the creation of power.

As in the Metamorphoses, these rapes probably have Hellenistic models; but the model is the poet’s choice, and footnotes do not cancel content any more than narrative structures do. These rapes echo the rapes of the Metamorphoses and Ars Amatoria and provide us with a new element: a paradigmatic structure.

RAPE AS JOKE

The three comic rapes are peculiar in that they are almost identical and seem to be Ovid’s invention (see Fantham 1983); Priapus’s attempted rapes of Lotis in Book 1 and of Vesta in Book 6 are the same in all but name. The shared elements are summed up in Table 8 .1.

The poet clearly marks these stories as jokes, with labels or narrative elements (“everyone laughed”) or both. Note the element of visual stimulus in the two longer tales: the nymphs show their breasts, legs, and naked feet through openings in their clothing (1.405-10); Omphale’s fancy clothes leave her “well worth looking at for her gilded bosom” (2.310). All three tales remark the gaze of the potential rapist. But more, the voice of these women is one that is “asking for it.” The circumstances allow license; most curious is the intimate dinner in the cave ( a location marked as both ritual and bucolic), with its cross-dressing (both traditional and ritual) which turns the rape of Omphale into the rape of Hercules (see now Loraux 1990). The poet gives a detailed description of Hercules in Omphale’s clothing, bursting the seams with his huge body (2.318-24); we recall Achilles’ transvestite rape of Deidamia. 2 The targeted woman goes to sleep, but attention is focused on the stealthy approach of the god. Slowly he comes, step by step … he pulls the covering up from the bottom . . . we hold our breath; this is the technique of the striptease ( or of the horror story, or of the Hellenstic love charm (Winkler 1990: 71-98), highly erotic, and the reader is seduced into the scenario. Such scenes were common in Roman wall painting (Fantham 1983: 198-99). The explicit descriptions of the god’s erection embody the source of the narrative’s desire-Faunus here assimilated to Priapus (2.346). Alarm, discovery, everyone laughs; the sight of the tumescent god in mid-rape is the primal scene of comedy.

THE COMIC STRUCTURE DRESSED UP

This comic structure recurs, surprisingly, in tragic and historic rapes in the Fasti, notably those of Lucretia, Rhea Silvia, and Lara. [170]

Ovid’s version of the Lucretia story follows closely the account in Livy’s history of Rome (1.57-59; see Joshel, Chapter 6 above) but changes the focus significantly. The men, and the reader, spy oh Lucretia and overhear her as she weaves by her bedside (2.741-58); the narrator comments on her looks (763-66); and Tarquin gloats on them in his memory-like Tereus. The staging of the rape enacts its meaning. Tarquin enters-hostis ut hospes init penetralia Collatini, “enemy as guest, he goes into the house/innards of Collatinus” (787); en route to Lucretia’s [171] room (793), he “frees his sword from its sheath” (cf. M. 6.551, 10.475)-like Priapus.

The rape itself includes physical details unusual for Ovid except in the comic rapes (794-804). Tarquin presses her down on the bed; she feels his hands on her breast. Lucretia is compared to a lamb lying under a wolf (799-800). The narrative presents her mute thoughts, and her difficulties with speech continue in the scene that follows the rape (823-28). The physical details of her suicide are strikingly emphasized: she falls sanguinulenta, “bloody” (832), rather than simply moribunda, as in Livy; Brutus pulls the dagger from her “half-living” body (838); her corpse shows her approval by moving its eyes and hair; and, the last we see of her, her wound (not just her body) is being exhibited to arouse the populace-volnus inane patet, “her gaping wound lies open” (849). She ends as she began, as object of the gaze. As in the comic rapes, the viewer/voyeur sees, burns, and acts; in the tragic version, we get to see the woman die as well. We even get to see inside her wound, as inside Philomela’s mouth. (Indeed, the poet moves from this episode to a brief allusion to Procne and Tereus, 853-56.)

Familiar elements recur in the rape of the Vestal Virgin, Rhea Silvia, by the god Mars (3.11-48), which resulted in the birth of Romulus, founder of Rome. We see her tripping down the path to fetch water; she sits on the riverbank; she opens the front of her dress (15-16) and pats her hair. And then she falls asleep in her idyllic surroundings. Mars sees her, desires her, and has her (21), and she wakes up pregnant (23)-“for, to be sure, the founder of the Roman city was within her guts” (intra viscera).

Lara’s story involves, like Philomela’s, not only rape but the punishment of sisterhood through silencing and mutilation. The story is given to explain who the dea Muta (“mute goddess”) is (2.583), so presumably Lara is to be elevated to godhead; this is not narrated. What is told is that the naiad Lara has warned the nymph Juturna that Jupiter intends to rape her (603-4) and has also told Juno (605- 6). To punish Lara, Jupiter rips out her tongue and gives her to Mercury, conductor of souls, to be taken down to live “with the ghosts in Hades, as the proper place for those who are silent” (609). En route they pass through a grove, where the mutilated Lara excites Mercury’s lust: “she is said then to have pleased the god, her guide” (612). He “gets ready” for rape (613, vim parat, a recurrent phrase in the Metamorphoses). She tries to plead with him but cannot: voltu pro verbis ilia precatur, let frustra muto nititur ore loqui, “she begs with her face in place of words,/and in vain she struggles to speak with mute mouth” (613-14; the mimetic effect of 614 can be compared with that of M. 6.558, Philomela’s tongue muttering into the ground). The instant result is that she becomes pregnant with twins who tum out to be minor gods (615-16)-end of story.

Familiar here is the incitement to lust inherent in the woman, the bucolic setting that serves as license, and the postponement of rape with compressed reference to male arousal (vim parat, both elliptical and insistent). In this case the postponement comes not from the tease of the rapist’s stealthy approach but from the efforts of a woman who is both speaking and silent, like someone attempting to speak in a dream: terror made voluptuous. The muting and mutilation of Lara, like that of Philomela, propel stories not theirs. [173]

Rape: The Insertion of Theory into the Text

To deal with these texts, I now present three theoretical models, in search of one that might offer a way out of the trap of representation.

The Pornographic Model: Rape Is Rape

Content analysis allows us to see past the legerdemain of style. As Laurie Colwin’s poet points out in the first epigraph, “great art” partakes of the mechanisms of pornography; The episodic structure, the elision of the act of rape, and the physical cruelty of the Metamorphoses recall Angela Carter’s analysis of Sade, especially of the scenarios of Justine (Carter 1978: 39, 44); indeed, Ovid’s endless supply of innocent nymphs prefigures Justine’s picaresque resilience, as the dissolution of bodies in metamorphosis prefigures the fantasies of the Freikorps men (Theweleit 1987: 171-204). When Susan Griffin says of the pornographer, “be gives woman a voice only to silence her” (S. Griffin 1981: 40), can we n?t apply this to Philomela? Lara? Lucretia?

The pornographic model, then, allows us to take Ovid’s rapes literally; to realize that they are, if not the whole text, an important part of it, not to be ignored; and to consider what we want to do with a canon that includes many such texts, finally weighing their hurtfulness in with their beauty. We want a way out. But then we must keep faith with history. Maybe Sade should not get so much credit for initiating modem sensibility; maybe history provides no way out. The average inhabitant of Rome enjoyed spectacles in reality that Sade could only bear in his imagination. And we must recall that to a Roman of the literary class, a story about a raped woman with a Greek name would have a peculiar resonance, suggesting not only the abstract figures of Greek erudition but the looted marble figures in his garden, the enslaved ( = sexually accessible) and living figure serving him dinner. Or serving her dinner.

The Cross-sex Fantasy Model: To Rape Is to Be Raped

Et qui spectavit vulnera vulnus habet.
[And a man who has seen wounds has a wound.]              -Ovid AA 1.166

The question of the experience of Ovid’s audience raises the possibility that the pornographic model is incomplete. If a theorists of fantasy argue, subjectivity oscillates, could Qvid have provided, even enjoyed, a female subjectivity? Before I consider what good this would do the (female) reader, I need to establish how it might have been possible in Ovid’s world.

The construction of Roman sexuality and textuality included two features of interest here. First, Roman men of the literary class often professed to be bisexual (Richlin 1983, esp. 220-26). Normative adult male sexuality, as expressed in love poetry, gos ip, and political invective, took the form of attraction to both women and adolescent males. Freeborn adolescents, though in principle off limits were at [173] least conscious of their attractiveness to older men, and there was no lack of slave boys. Attraction of adult males to other adult males was, in these texts, the source of loathing. Being penetrated (pati) was seen as a staining of the body (which illuminates the claim, discussed above, that women enjoyed it; we recall Caenis).

Our sources on the construction of Roman women’s sexuality are too indirect and fragmentary to tell us much; they were expected to marry, often before age fifteen, and might well divorce and remarry.

Second, the theater at Rome in Ovid’s time (Lucian On Dancing 34) included an extremely popular form, pantomime, in which a male dancer was the central figure, often playing a woman. A line of musicians and singers sang the story in Greek, and a second actor played any necessary minor characters; but the first dancer was the star and danced all the main roles (hence panto-mimus) of the play (Beare 1955).

Pantomime sets Ovid’s rapes in 3-D. That it was so popular testifies to a special ambivalence in Roman culture, which commonly stigmatized dancing as effeminate (Richlin 1983: 92-93, 98; cf. Pliny Panegyric 54.1). Meanwhile, the satirist Juvenal indicates that pantomimes sometimes depicted the sexual misadventures of mythic heroines: Leda (6.63), Pelopea (who bore Aegisthus to her father Thyestes), and Philomela (7 . 92).

Gossip records that dancers were lusted after by the rich and famous (so of Bathyllus and Maecenas; Tac. Ann. 1.54.3). Satire avers that women found the dance of rape sexually exciting (Juv. 6.63-66):

When effeminate Bathyllus dances the pantomime Leda,
Tuccia can’t control her bladder, Apula squeals,
as if in an embrace, suddenly and a wretched sostenuto.
Thymele pays attention; then rustic Thymele learns.

“Leda” would be the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan. Is the male actor called effeminate because he is? Because he is dancing? Because he is playing a woman? Because he is dancing a rape? Because he is dancing a man/bird/ god raping a woman? Does the women’s purported reaction have an objective correlative? We think of Mick Jagger in drag. That such a spectacle would have been considered dangerous for a respectable young man is attested by a letter of Pliny (7. 24 ), in which he describes the situation in the house of Ummidia Quadratilla: a racy old aristocrat, she considered her troupe of pantomime actors a good relaxation for herself, but she always sent her grandson away to study when they were about to perform.

Was this any more to Ovid than part of his social milieu? It seems so. The Elder Seneca’s rhetorical memoirs include a sketch of Ovid, the star student, in his college days; Seneca ends by observing that “Ovid rarely declaimed controversiae [arguments], and only ethicas [ones involving character portrayal]; he much preferred suasoriae” (Controversiae 2.2.12). Suasoriae were speeches given in character, usually of a famous historical person; this penchant for dramatics pervades Ovid’s poetry. Other writers wrote for the pantomimi, especially when they needed money: the son of one of Ovid’s fellow students, who Seneca complains “polluted his talent” (Suasoriae 2: 19); the first-century poets Statius, who Juvenal claims sold an Agave to the pantomimus Paris to make ends meet (7 .82-92), and Lucan, who [174] wrote fourteen salticae fabulae, “scripts for the dance” (Lucani vita). Ovid explicitly denies having done any such thing-even though his poems are appearing on the stage, “danced to a full house,” during his exile (Tristia 2.519-20, 5.7.25- 28; see Myerowitz, Chapter 7 above on this apologia).

The seriocomic dialogue On Dancing, by the Greek writer Lucian, composed at Antioch in Asia Minor between A.D. 162 and 165, testifies to the conservative view of pantomime as effeminate (1, 2, 3, 5), both in itself and in its effect on the audience; to the frenzy of the audience (2, 3, 5); and to the prominence in the performance of the man dancing the woman’s role, especially a raped woman (2, 28). The crusty interlocutor describes being in the audience of the pantomime (2):

Watching an effeminate man mincing vainly about with dainty clothing and unbridled songs and imitating sex-crazed dames, the lewdest of those in antiquity, Phaedras and Parthenopes and Rhodopes. [Parthenope was a Siren who yearned for Odysseus; Rhodope married her own brother.]

Lucian describes the dancer’s flowing silk garb (29-30, 63, 66) and his masks– five for one performance would not be unusual. The mask was beautiful (unlike those of comedy and tragedy) and had a closed mouth.

But what most suggests a tie with Ovid is Lucian’s list of the topics a good pantomimus must know by heart (37-61), which tallies closely in order, arrangement, and content with the Metamorphoses as a whole (Galinsky 1975: 68-69, 132, 139). It includes the tale of Procne and Philomela (40): “and the [daughters] of Pandion, both what they suffered in Thrace and what they did.” Also the tale of Pelopea (43), which Juvenal mentioned as well-a father seduces a daughter. The pantomimus is to learn, in particular, transformations (57) and, most of all, the loves of the gods (59)-that is, their rapes of goddesses and women. This list mentions fifty-six women’s roles, including two historical figures (Stratonice and Cleopatra), plus one for a man in drag: Achilles on Skyros. This recalls not only the tale of Achilles and Deidamia in the Ars, inset into the text like a dramatic interlude, but also the Fasti and the attempted rape of Hercules (which Fantham suggests came from pantomime; 1983: 200-201); the freeze-frame tableaux of the Sabines running (set in the archaic theater and forerunner of the experience of women at the theater); and the rapes by gods in drag in the Metamorphoses.

Describing a great dancer at the court of Nero, Lucian stresses the way he could tell a whole story in gesture. This might explain one curiosity of Ovid’s style; look again at 6.551-57 (Philomela’s rape). With one hand, Tereus unsheathes his sword; with the other, he grabs Philomela by the hair; with the other, he bends her arms behind her back; with the other, he chains her wrists; with the other, he grabs her tongue with a pair of forceps; and finally he uses the sword to cut out her tongue. And compare 6.338-68, in the comic tale of the goddess Latona and the Lycian farmers: throughout, Latona carries her newborn twins in her arms (338); they even play a part in the drama (359); at 368, the angry goddess dramatically raises her palms to the sky to curse the oafish farmers. What has happened to the babies? Perhaps this is not baroque illogic but cubist logic; perhaps this transformative poem derives its poetry from motion, the motion of the dance. [175]

Lucian also draws a direct comparison between dancing and rhetoric (65), basing it explicitly on the shared art of impersonation, especially as found in rhetorical exercises, Ovid’s old specialty.

The connection between Ovid’s poetry and the pantomime accords well with the model of fantasy derived from psychoanalytic theory, in which the subject is said to oscillate among the terms of the fantasy (Fletcher 1986; C. Kaplan 1986, based on the work of Laplanche and Pontalis ). Thus, in one of the basic schemas, “a father seduces a daughter,” the subject can be in the place of “father,” “daughter,” or even of the verb “seduces.” The interrelations among this concept, Ovid’s poetry, and the pantomime are most striking. The model exactly describes the performance of the dancer-first one character, then another, with the essential need to enact the interaction between the characters; and not just any characters but, often, the father seducing a daughter (Pelopea) or an equivalent (Leda). Or vicariously: Tereus imagining himself in Pandion’s place so that he could fondle Philomela. The poet’s fascination with the reversal, whereby a [daughter] (Medea, Scylla, Byblis, Myrrha) seduces a [father], is delimited by the extreme anxiety of the Salmacis episode, where the female has become subject rather than object, and the male is forced not only to become but to remain female.

Roman poets generally published their works by giving readings, usually to circles of friends; and we recall the male Roman’s experience of being the object of the male gaze, as an adolescent. So can it be said that Ovid empathizes with his rape victims? Certainly-as a great pantomimus might; but not with any but a delicious pity for them, a very temporary taking on of their experience, their bodies. How beautiful she looks in flight; one woman feels the hot breath of the rapist on her neck, another is caught bathing naked, a third taken by surprise on her way to visit her sister. For a few the rapist even first dresses as a woman, so that the phallus can be a surprise and teach its lesson about gender again. I imagine the poet himself (or the narrator, or both) “dancing” his characters one by one: a father, seduces, a daughter.

Ovid’s special circumstances lend themselves to this imagination. The Metamorphoses was completed when Ovid was in exile, for offenses connected with his poetry (Goold 1983), to the cold wilderness of Tomis. The muted victims, the artists horribly punished by legalistic gods for bold expression-Marsyas, and especially Arachne-read like allegories of Ovid’s experience. Philomela weaves a message to her sister; the unvoiced Cyane with her “inconsolable wound” (5.426) gives Proserpina’s belt to Demeter as a sign. At this level it might be possible to argue for Ovid as metapornographer. But if the Metamorphoses lays bare a cruel cosmos, it does so voluptuously.

The pleasure of the style and the pleasure in the content are congruent. Moreover, the universe described horrifies and allures us precisely because it is out of kilter, as is the style with the content. Perhaps this is why rape is such a suitable scenario for the Metamorphoses, which comes to involve dissolution of the boundaries of body, genus, gender, and genre. (And not rape alone; the poem is full of incest, the mating of human with statue, cross-sex transformations.) Such a phenomenon has been taken into account for Greek literature (Bergren 1983; Zeitlin 1985a) but not for Latin. But perhaps Roman culture, so obsessed with boundaries, [176] is precisely the place for it. Rape as a passport to death, or to dissolution of the body, may have made sense to Ovid and his audience.

Compare a story in Tacitus (Annals 5.9):

It was then decided that the remaining children of Sejanus should be punished, though the rage of the mob was thinning out, and many were soothed by the executions already carried out. Therefore they are carried into the prison, the boy understanding what was about to take place, the girl still unaware, so that she was asking over and over, “For what misdeed, and where was she being taken? She would not do it again,” and “she could be cautioned with the ordinary children’s beating.” The authors of that time say that because it was considered unheard-of for a virgin to be submitted to a capital execution, she was raped by the executioner with the noose lying next to her; then, with their necks squeezed, bodies so young were thrown out on the Gemonian steps.

The execution was, except for the rape, normal for political prisoners in those abnormal times (see G. Williams 1978: 184). The story appears again, generalized, in Suetonius (Tiberius 61.5); editors compare a case during the triumviral proscriptions (a time Ovid lived through), reported by the much later writer Dio (47 .6), in which a young boy was put forward into the class of men-made to assume the toga virilis-so that he could legally be executed. The sixteenth-century classicist Lipsius comments that the same reasoning underlies the case of Sejanus’s daughterthat once having been raped and deflowered, mulier videretur, “she would seem a woman.”
The case of Sejanus’s daughter comes from A.D. 31, the accounts of it from the early second century A.D.; but the logic of it, rape as a rite de passage, atrocity as it is to these two writers, informs their texts as it does Ovid’s.

We begin to look for ways out; the model begins to feel like a trap.

First, what about the female members of Ovid’s audience? Is it possible that this poetry includes a female subjectivity? But we have no evidence of any raised consciousness among Roman women; I think rather of Angela Carter’s description of the women listening eagerly to a male speaker in Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir (1978: 143): “Since he is good enough to class them with the masters, they, too, will be permitted to tyrannise as much as they please. Libido … is genderless.” If women are invited to identify across gender boundaries, the process is not necessarily revolutionary (C. Kaplan 1986).

Isn’t this just the pornographic again? In Sade, and commonly, the assumption of a female voice is a central technique (Kappeler 1986: 30; and see Parker, Henry, Joshel in this volume); even dominance by women, when written into the scenario, is just another thrill (Carter 1978: 20-21). Fantasy of movement within the system is not escape from the system.

But some argue that fantasies mean something completely different from what they say-for example, that fantasized violence provides an excuse for cuddling (Russ 1985), or that the mutilation of the love object is a covert expression of anger at the object’s power (Modleski 1982: 24-25). The implication that the degree of the “covert” anger correlates directly with a real power is very disturbing when [177] applied to fantasized violence against women (for a glaring example of this, see Auerbach 1982). Rather than congratulate ourselves, we must bear in mind the disparity between the reality of women’s historical power and the size of the shackles historically placed upon it.

Like the pornographic model, the cross-sex fantasy model offers no exit from gender hierarchy. The female is still the site of violence, no matter what the location of the subject. Even if the magician and the lady change places, he is still taking her place.

A Political Model: Rape Is Rape, Resistance ls Possible

Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris.
[It is proper to human nature to hate one whom you have hurt.]

-Tacitus Agricola 42.3

We need a political model that will both describe the magician’s act and suggest a way to end it. Let me postulate that the problem is not gender but hierarchy: within hierarchy, violence is a right, and the control of violence diminishes liberty. An anarchic system is thus a precondition for the deletion of the pornographic. Though escape from hierarchy has seemed impossible, I would postulate that there are some “open” discourses that permit it: theory, mathematics, nonrepresentational art, music. Other, “closed” systems-humor, fantasy, narratives, film, and representational art-all interrelated, form the bars around hierarchy.

The structure of these closed discourses is political, and they have four main characteristics: (1) They contain a cue that says any item is untrue, creating what I call the “Archie Bunker fallacy” (“It’s just a joke!”). Ovid actually asserted this in his poems from exile (e.g., Tristia 2.491-96). (2) Content follows function and is not arbitrary. (3) The relation between each item and reality depends on the status of the users; these discourses maintain the status quo. (4) Historically, though perhaps not necessarily, the hierarchy has been gendered. The position at the bottom, so often a woman’s, has never been pleasant; something in it “exposes the meatiness of human flesh” (Carter 1978: 140; see Kappeler 1986: 63-81; Rabinowitz, Parker, Brown in this volume).

Where does this leave us? On the one hand, history weighs heavy, and closed discourse is more comfortable than open. Revolutionary discourse is intrinsically unamusing. How ephemeral, how dry this essay is compared with Ovid’s poetry! And insofar as it amuses, it fails. On the other hand, when we see problems of discourse as systemic, we can gauge our task. The female can no longer be by definition the site of violence-nothing can. What happens if we say, as Kappeler does (221), “Art will have to go”? Maybe there is something else. Meanwhile we must use what exists to show what is wrong.

Conclusion

How can women read? And why should we read Ovid? How badly do we need this history ? I borrow an answer from Toni Morrison. We’re stuck with Philomela; she’s [178] like Beloved, the dearly beloved ghost of grief, and to be blind to her is not to exorcise her. We need to know her and keep faith with history.

The battle for consciousness must go on (see de Lauretis 1984: 185) and focus on concrete political improvements in women’s lives. As classicists, as scholars, as teachers, as women and men who speak to other people, we can fight in this battle. What can we do?

(1) We can speak and write about antiquity for other feminists and people outside the academy. We can remake our disciplines (Hallett 1985). We can move outside of Classics, and we can open up the boundaries of Classics itself; that’s what this book is trying for.

(2) We can blow up the canon. Canons are part of social system;. We recognize the one we have as dysfunctional. It must and will change; we can surely critique the pleasure of the text without fear of breaking anything irreplaceable.

(3) We can claim our lack. We can ask, where am I in this text? What can it do for me? What did it do to its audience?

(4) We can appropriate; we can resist. The old stories await our retelling; they haunt our language anyway. And if the only names we have to speak in are names of blood, maybe we can speak the blood off them. History is what groups write as they come to power.

NOTES

Thanks to Marilyn Skinner and Susan Kapost for the bibliography that got me started; Terri Marsh for much help along the way; groups at Carleton University, UC Santa Cruz, Hamilton College, and Amherst College for critical listening; and the Lehigh Valley Feminist Research Group for jumping in. To the readers of the manuscript-Sandra Joshel, Molly Myerowitz, and Robert Sutton-I am more indebted than I can say.

Pro comite stuprata trucidata: postremo munere mortis.

1. All translations are my own and are as close to word-for-word as possible.

2. This tale bears a striking resemblance to a current joke: Batman sees Superman, who looks distressed. Batman asks why. Superman says he had flown down to the beach to look at women, when he saw Wonder Woman lying naked in an enclosed backyard, writhing and groaning sexily. So he zoomed down and … did it! Batman is horrified. But wasn’t she scared? Did she scream? “Did she scream!” says Superman. “You should have heard the Invisible Man!” (Collected Norwich, Vermont, 1981.) There is the same transferral of the rape from female to male object (and from human to divine spheres). A similar flying-and-spying takes place in the tale of Mercury and Herse (M. 2. 708ff).

Richlin, Amy “Reading Ovid’s Rape,” 1992 from Amy Richlin (ed.). Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome. Oxford University Press.

IV

Lucretia

I want to begin by acknowledging that we are continuing with the theme of rape in this module.  If you didn’t yet have a chance to read the Richlin essay included in the RESOURCES part at the end of this pressbook, I do recommend.

We’re going to read three versions of the same story.  They are short, but brutal.  By comparing and contrasting these, and diving into the repetition of them by multiple Roman authors, we will be able to consider their significance in Roman history and culture.

First, we return to Book I of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita — jumping ahead 40 chapters or so.  We’ve skipped the description of several of the king’s reigns.  We jump in here at the tail-end of the monarchic period.  (Revisit Part II above for chronologies, maps, etc.).  The king is Lucius Tarquinius Superbus; he’s not an especially popular monarch.  He rules with his sons including Sextus Tarquinius.  We enter the story during a war with the neighboring Rutuli in Ardea.  Livy gives the most often read version of the rape of Lucretia, and the consequences for Rome.

Next, we’ll look at a second version of the same story: Dionysius of Halicarnasus.  A short bio is included in that chapter.

Third, we read a bit of Ovid’s Fasti, for a third version of this story.

As with the Rape of the Sabine Women, Lucretia has been a popular subject for representation in visual art (and other media, including a 1946 opera by Benjamin Britten, restaged as recently as 2016).  What do you make of another Roman rape with a still-growing afterlife?

J’Nai Bridges as Lucretia and Will Liverman as Tarquinius in the Wolf Trap Opera’s production of “The Rape of Lucretia.” (Scott Suchman/For Wolf Trap Opera)

We will also read Sandra Joshel’s essay as well as Joanna Kenty’s “Avenging Lucretia” from Eidolon.  Begin, as you read these essays, to think about authorial voice.  Compare Joshel and Kenty’s styles.  I’m curious: are you beginning to develop your own style on your blog?

Please continue to use hypothesis to annotate this module.

13

Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Volume I. 57 - 60 : Tarquinius and Lucretia

Livy: Ab Urbe Condita (History of Rome)

Book One

LVII

Ardea belonged to the Rutuli, who were a nation of commanding wealth, for that place and period. This very fact was the cause of the war, since the Roman king was eager not only to enrich himself, impoverished as he was by the splendour of his public works, but also to appease with booty the feeling of the common people; who, besides the enmity they bore the monarch for other acts of pride, were especially resentful that the king should have kept them employed so long as artisans and doing the work of slaves. An attempt was made to capture Ardea by assault. Having failed in this, the Romans invested [197] the place with intrenchments, and began to beleaguer the enemy. Here in their permanent camp, as is usual with a war not sharp but long drawn out, furlough was rather freely granted, more freely however to the leaders than to the soldiers; the young princes for their part passed their idle hours together at dinners and drinking bouts. It chanced, as they were drinking in the quarters of Sextus Tarquinius, where Tarquinius Collatinus, son of Egerius, was also a guest, that the subject of wives came up. Every man fell to praising his own wife with enthusiasm, and, as their rivalry grew hot, Collatinus said that there was no need to talk about it, for it was in their power to know, in a few hours’ time, how far the rest were excelled by his own Lucretia. “Come! If the vigour of youth is in us let us mount our horses and see for ourselves the disposition of our wives. Let every man regard as the surest test what meets his eyes when the woman’s husband enters unexpected.” They were heated with wine. “Agreed!” they all cried, and clapping spurs to their horses were off for Rome. Arriving there at early dusk, they thence proceeded to Collatia, where Lucretia was discovered very differently employed from the daughters-in-law of the king. These they had seen at a luxurious banquet, whiling away the time with their young friends; but Lucretia, though it was late at night, was busily engaged upon her wool, while her maidens toiled about her in the lamplight as she sat in the hall of her house.[1] The prize of this contest in womanly virtues fell to Lucretia. As Collatinus and the Tarquinii approached, they were graciously received, and the victorious husband courteously invited the young princes to his table. It was there [199] that Sextus Tarquinius was seized with a wicked desire to debauch Lucretia by force; not only her beauty, but her proved chastity as well, provoked him. However, for the present they ended the boyish prank of the night and returned to the camp.

LVIII

When a few days had gone by, Sextus Tarquinius, without letting Collatinus know, took a single attendant and went to Collatia. Being kindly welcomed, for no one suspected his purpose, he was brought after dinner to a guest-chamber. Burning with passion, he waited till it seemed to him that all about him was secure and everybody fast asleep; then, drawing his sword, he came to the sleeping Lucretia. Holding the woman down with his left hand on her breast, he said, “Be still, Lucretia! I am Sextus Tarquinius. My sword is in my hand. Utter a sound, and you die!” In affright the woman started out of her sleep. No help was in sight, but only imminent death. Then Tarquinius began to declare his love, to plead, to mingle threats with prayers, to bring every resource to bear upon her woman’s heart. When he found her obdurate and not to be moved even by fear of death, he went farther and threatened her with disgrace, saying that when she was dead he would kill his slave and lay him naked by her side, that she might be said to have been put to death in adultery with a man of base condition. At this dreadful prospect her resolute modesty was overcome, as if with force, by his victorious lust; and Tarquinius departed, exulting in his conquest of a woman’s honour. Lucretia, grieving at her great disaster, dispatched the same message to her father in Rome and to her husband at Ardea: [201] that they should each take a trusty friend and come; that they must do this and do it quickly, for a frightful thing had happened. Spurius Lucretius came with Publius Valerius, Volesus’ son. Collatinus brought Lucius Junius Brutus, with whom he chanced to be returning to Rome when he was met by the messenger from his wife. Lucretia they found sitting sadly in her chamber. The entrance of her friends brought the tears to her eyes, and to her husband’s question, “Is all well?” she replied, “Far from it; for what can be well with a woman when she has lost her honour? The print of a strange man, Collatinus, is in your bed. Yet my body only has been violated; my heart is guiltless, as death shall be my witness. But pledge your right hands and your words that the adulterer shall not go unpunished. Sextus Tarquinius is he that last night returned hostility for hospitality, and brought ruin on me, and on himself no less—if you are men—when he worked his pleasure with me.” They give their pledges, every man in turn. They seek to comfort her, sick at heart as she is, by diverting the blame from her who was forced to the doer of the wrong. They tell her it is the mind that sins, not the body; and that where purpose has been wanting there is no guilt. “It is for you to determine,” she answers, “what is due to him; for my own part, though I acquit myself of the sin, I do not absolve myself from punishment; nor in time to come shall ever unchaste woman live through the example of Lucretia.” Taking a knife which she had concealed beneath her dress, she plunged it into her heart, and sinking forward upon the wound, died as she fell. The wail for the dead was raised by her husband and her father. [203]

LIX

Brutus, while the others were absorbed in grief, drew out the knife from Lucretia’s wound, and holding it up, dripping with gore, exclaimed, “By this blood, most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear, and I take you, gods, to witness, that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and his wicked wife and all his children, with sword, with fire, aye with whatsoever violence I may; and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome!” The knife he then passed to Collatinus, and from him to Lucretius and Valerius. They were dumbfounded at this miracle. Whence came this new spirit in the breast of Brutus? As he bade them, so they swore. Grief was swallowed up in anger; and when Brutus summoned them to make war from that very moment on the power of the kings, they followed his lead. They carried out Lucretia’s corpse from the house and bore it to the market-place, where men crowded about them, attracted, as they were bound to be, by the amazing character of the strange event and its heinousness. Every man had his own complaint to make of the prince’s crime and his violence. They were moved, not only by the father’s sorrow, but by the fact that it was Brutus who chid their tears and idle lamentations and urged them to take up the sword, as befitted men and Romans, against those who had dared to treat them as enemies. The boldest of the young men seized their weapons and offered themselves for service, and the others followed their example. Then, leaving Lucretia’s father to guard Collatia, and posting sentinels so that no one might announce the rising to the royal family, the rest, equipped for battle and with Brutus in command, set out for Rome. Once there, wherever their armed [205] band advanced it brought terror and confusion; but again, when people saw that in the van were the chief men of the state, they concluded that whatever it was it could be no meaningless disturbance. And in fact there was no less resentment at Rome when this dreadful story was known than there had been at Collatia. So from every quarter of the City men came running to the Forum. No sooner were they there than a crier summoned the people before the Tribune of the Celeres,[1] which office Brutus then happened to be holding. There he made a speech by no means like what might have been expected of the mind and the spirit which he had feigned up to that day. He spoke of the violence and lust of Sextus Tarquinius, of the shameful defilement of Lucretia and her deplorable death, of the bereavement of Tricipitinus, in whose eyes the death of his daughter was not so outrageous and deplorable as was the cause of her death. He reminded them, besides, of the pride of the king himself and the wretched state of the commons, who were plunged into ditches and sewers and made to clear them out. The men of Rome, he said, the conquerors of all the nations round about, had been transformed from warriors into artisans and stone-cutters. He spoke of the shameful murder of King Tullius, and how his daughter had driven her accursed chariot over her father’s body, and he invoked the gods who punish crimes against parents. With these and, I fancy, even fiercer reproaches, such as occur to a man in the very presence of an outrage, but are far from easy for an historian to reproduce, he inflamed the people, and brought them to abrogate the king’s authority and to exile Lucius Tarquinius, together with his wife and children. Brutus himself then enrolled the juniors, who [207] voluntarily gave in their names, and arming them set out for the camp at Ardea to arouse the troops against the king. The command at Rome he left with Lucretius, who had been appointed Prefect of the City by the king, some time before. During this confusion Tullia fled from her house, cursed wherever she went by men and women, who called down upon her the furies that avenge the wrongs of kindred.

LX

When the news of these events reached the camp, the king, in alarm at the unexpected danger, set out for Rome to put down the revolt. Brutus, who had perceived the king’s approach, made a circuit to avoid meeting him, and at almost the same moment, though by different roads, Brutus reached Ardea and Tarquinius Rome. Against Tarquinius the gates were closed and exile was pronounced. The liberator of the City was received with rejoicings in the camp, and the sons of the king were driven out of it. Two of them followed their father, and went into exile at Caere, in Etruria. Sextus Tarquinius departed for Gabii, as though it had been his own kingdom, and there the revengers of old quarrels, which he had brought upon himself by murder and rapine, slew him.

Lucius Tarquinius Superbus ruled for five and twenty years. The rule of the kings at Rome, from its foundation to its liberation, lasted two hundred and forty-four years. Two consuls were then chosen in the centuriate comitia, under the presidency of the Prefect of the City, in accordance with the commentaries of Servius Tullius.[1] These were Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. [209]

14

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, Book 4

Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BCE and went to Italy before 29 BCE. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BCE. Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the 20 books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BCE) we have the first 9 complete; most of 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.

Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.

The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.

Book IV

LXIV. Tarquinius[3] was then laying seige to Ardea, alleging as his reason that it was receiving the Roman fugitives and assisting them in their endeavours to return home. The truth was, however, that he had designs against this city on account of its wealth, since it was the most flourishing of all the cities in Italy. But as the Ardeates bravely defended themselves and the siege was proving a lengthy one, both the Romans who were in the camp, being fatigued by the length of the war, and those at Rome, who had become exhausted by the war taxes, were ready to revolt if any occasion offered for making a beginning. At this time Sextus, the eldest son of Tarquinius, being sent by his father to a city called Collatia to perform certain military services, lodged at the house of his kinsman, Lucius Tarquinius, surnamed Collatinus. This man is said by Fabius to have been the son of Egerius, who, as I have shown earlier,[1] was the nephew of Tarquinius the first Roman king of that name, and having been appointed governor of Collatia, was not only himself called Collatinus from his living there, but also left the same surname to his posterity. But, for my part, I am persuaded that he too was a grandson of Egerius,[2] inasmuch as he was of the same age as the sons of Tarquinius, as Fabius and the other historians have recorded; for the chronology confirms me in this opinion. Now it happened that Collatinus was then at the camp, but his wife, who was a Roman woman, the daughter of Lucretius, a man of distinction, entertained him, as a kinsman of her husband, with great cordiality and friendliness. This matron, who excelled all the Roman women in beauty as well as in virtue, Sextus tried to seduce; he had already long entertained this desire, whenever he visited his kinsman, and he thought he now had a favourable opportunity. Going, therefore, to bed after supper, he waited a great part of the night, and then, when he thought all were asleep, he got up and came to the room where he knew Lucretia slept, and without being discovered by her slaves, who lay asleep at the door, he went into the room sword in hand.

LXV. When he paused at the woman’s bedside and she, hearing the noise, awakened and asked who it was, he told her his name and bade her be silent and remain in the room, threatening to kill her if she attempted either to escape or to cry out. Having terrified the woman in this manner, he offered her two alternatives, bidding her choose whichever she herself preferred—death with dishonour or life with happiness. “For,” he said, “if you will consent to gratify me, I will make you my wife, and with me you shall reign, for the present, over the city my father has given me, and, after his death, over the Romans, the Latins, the Tyrrhenians, and all the other nations he rules; for I know that I shall succeed to my father’s kingdom, as is right, since I am his eldest son. But why need I inform you of the many advantages which attend royalty, all of which you shall share with me, since you are well acquainted with them? If, however, you endeavour to resist from a desire to preserve your virtue, I will kill you and then slay one of your slaves, and having laid both your bodies together, will state that I had caught you misbehaving with the slave and punished you to avenge the dishonour of my kinsman; so that your death will be attended with shame and reproach and your body will be deprived both of burial and every other customary rite.” And as he kept urgently repeating his threats and entreaties and swearing that he was speaking the truth as to each alternative, Lucretia, fearing the ignominy of the death he threatened, was forced to yield and to allow him to accomplish his desire.

LXVI. When it was day, Sextus, having gratified his wicked and baneful passion, returned to the camp. But Lucretia, overwhelmed with shame at what had happened, got into her carriage in all haste, dressed in black raiment under which she had a dagger concealed, and set out for Rome, without saying a word to any person who saluted her when they met or making answer to those who wished to know what had befallen her, but continued thoughtful and downcast, with her eyes full of tears. When she came to her father’s house, where some of his relations happened to be present, she threw herself at his feet and embracing his knees, wept for some time without uttering a word, And when he raised her up and asked her what had befallen her, she said: “I come to you as a suppliant, father, having endured terrible and intolerable outrage, and I beg you to avenge me and not to overlook your daughter’s having suffered worse things than death.” When her father as well as all the others was struck with wonder at hearing this and he asked her to tell who had outraged her and in what manner, she said: “You will hear of my misfortunes very soon, father; but first grant me this favour I ask of you. Send for as many of your friends and kinsmen as you can, so that they may hear the report from me, the victim of terrible wrongs, rather than from others. And when you have learned to what shameful and dire straits I was reduced, consult with them in what manner you will avenge both me and yourself. But do not let the time between be long.”

LXVII. When, in response to his hasty and urgent summons, the most prominent men had come to his house as she desired, she began at the beginning and told them all that had happened. Then, after embracing her father and addressing many entreaties both to him and to all present and praying to the gods and other divinities to grant her a speedy departure from life, she drew the dagger she was keeping concealed under her robes, and plunging it into her breast, with a single stroke pierced her heart. Upon this the women beat their breasts and filled the house with their shrieks and lamentations, but her father, enfolding her body in his arms, embraced it, and calling her by name again and again, ministered to her, as though she might recover from her wound, until in his arms, gasping and breathing out her life, she expired. This dreadful scene struck the Romans who were present with so much horror and compassion that they all cried out with one voice that they would rather die a thousand deaths in defence of their liberty than suffer such outrages to be committed by the tyrants. There was among them a certain man, named Publius Valerius, a descendant of one of those Sabines who came to Rome with Tatius, and a man of action and prudence. This man was sent by them to the camp both to acquaint the husband of Lucretia with what had happened and with his aid to bring about a revolt of the army from the tyrants. He was no sooner outside the gates than he chanced to meet Collatinus, who was coming to the city from the camp and knew nothing of the misfortunes that had befallen his household. And with him came Lucius Junius, surnamed Brutus, which, translated into the Greek language, would be êlithios or “dullard.” Concerning this man, since the Romans say that he was the prime mover in the expulsion of the tyrants, I must say a few words before continuing my account, to explain who he was and of what descent and for what reason he got this surname, which did not at all describe him.

LXVIII. The[1] father of Brutus was Marcus Junius, a descendant of one of the colonists in the company of Aeneas, and a man who for his merits was ranked among the most illustrious of the Romans; his mother was Tarquinia, a daughter of the first King Tarquinius. He himself enjoyed the best upbringing and education that his country afforded and he had a nature not averse to any noble accomplishment. Tarquinius, after he had caused Tullius to be slain, put Junius’ father also to death secretly, together with many other worthy men, not for any crime, but because he was in possession of the inheritance of an ancient family enriched by the good fortune of his ancestors, the spoils of which Tarquinius coveted; and together with the father he slew the elder son, who showed indications of a noble spirit unlikely to permit the death of his father to go unavenged. Thereupon Brutus, being still a youth and entirely destitute of all assistance from his family, undertook to follow the most prudent of all courses, which was to feign a stupidity that was not his; and he continued from that time to maintain this pretence of folly from which he acquired his surname, till he thought the proper time had come to throw it off. This saved him from suffering any harm at the hands of the tyrant at a time when many good men were perishing.

LXIX. For Tarquinius, despising in him this stupidity, which was only apparent and not real, took all his inheritance from him, and allowing him a small maintenance for his daily support, kept him under his own authority, as an orphan who still stood in need of guardians, and permitted him to live with his own sons, not by way of honouring him as a kinsman, which was the pretence he made to his friends, but in order that Brutus, by saying many stupid things and by acting the part of a real fool, might amuse the lads. And when he sent two of his sons, Arruns and Titus, to consult the Delphic oracle concerning the plague[1] (for some uncommon malady had in his reign descended upon both maids and boys, and many died of it, but it fell with the greatest severity and without hope of cure upon women with child, destroying the mothers in travail together with their infants), desiring to learn from the god both the cause of this distemper and the remedy for it, he sent Brutus along with the lads, at their request, so that they might have somebody to laugh at and abuse. When the youths had come to the oracle and had received answers concerning the matter upon which they were sent, they made their offerings to the god and laughed much at Brutus for offering a wooden staff to Apollo; in reality he had secretly hollowed the whole length of it like a tube and inserted a rod of gold. After this they inquired of the god which of them was destined to succeed to the sovereignty of Rome; and the god answered, “the one who should first kiss his mother.” The youths, therefore, not knowing the meaning of the oracle, agreed together to kiss their mother at the same time, desiring to possess the kingship jointly; but Brutus, understanding what the god meant, as soon as he landed in Italy, stooped to the earth and kissed it, looking upon that as the common mother of all mankind. Such, then, were the earlier events in the life of this man.

LXX. On[1] the occasion in question, when Brutus had heard Valerius relate all that had befallen Lucretia and describe her violent death, he lifted up his hands to Heaven and said: “O Jupiter and all ye gods who keep watch over the lives of men, has that time now come in expectation of which I have been keeping up this pretence in my manner of life? Has fate ordained that the Romans shall by me and through me be delivered from this intolerable tyranny? “Having said this, he went in all haste to the house together with Collatinus and Valerius. When they came in Collatinus, seeing Lucretia lying in the midst and her father embracing her, uttered a loud cry and, throwing his arms about his wife’s body, kept kissing her and calling her name and talking to her as if she had been alive; for he was out of his mind by reason of his calamity. While he and her father were pouring forth their lamentations in turn and the whole house was filled with wailing and mourning, Brutus, looking at them, said: “You will have countless opportunities, Lucretius, Collatinus, and all of you who are kinsmen of this woman, to bewail her fate; but now let us consider how to avenge her, for that is what the present moment calls for.” His advice seemed good; and sitting down by themselves and ordering the slaves and attendants to withdraw, they consulted together what they ought to do. And first Brutus began to speak about himself, telling them that what was generally believed to be his stupidity was not real, but only assumed, and informing them of the reasons which had induced him to submit to this pretence; whereupon they regarded him as the wisest of all men. Next he endeavoured to persuade them all to be of one mind in expelling both Tarquinius and his sons from Rome; and he used many alluring arguments to this end. When he found they were all of the same mind, he told them that what was needed was neither words nor promises, but deeds, if any of the needful things were to be accomplished; and he declared that he himself would take the lead in such deeds. Having said this, he took the dagger with which Lucretia had slain herself, and going to the body (for it still lay in view, a most piteous spectacle), he swore by Mars and all the other gods that he would do everything in his power to overthrow the dominion of the Tarquinii and that he would neither be reconciled to the tyrants himself nor tolerate any who should be reconciled to them, but would look upon every man who thought otherwise as an enemy and till his death would pursue with unrelenting hatred both the tyranny and its abettors; and if he should violate his oath, he prayed that he and his children might meet with the same end as Lucretia.

LXXI. Having said this, he called upon all the rest also to take the same oath; and they, no longer hesitating, rose up, and receiving the dagger from one another, swore. After they had taken the oath they at once considered in what manner they should go about their undertaking. And Brutus advised them as follows: “First, let us keep the gates under guard, so that Tarquinius may have no intelligence of what is being said and done in the city against the tyranny till everything on our side is in readiness. After that, let us carry the body of this woman, stained as it is with blood, into the Forum, and exposing it to the public view, call an assembly of the people. When they are assembled and we see the Forum crowded, let Lucretius and Collatinus come forward and bewail their misfortunes, after first relating everything that has happened. Next, let each of the others come forward, inveigh against the tyranny, and summon the citizens to liberty. It will be what all Romans have devoutly wished if they see us, the patricians, making the first move on behalf of liberty. For they have suffered many dreadful wrongs at the hands of the tyrant and need but slight encouragement. And when we find the people eager to overthrow the monarchy, let us give them an opportunity to vote that Tarquinius shall no longer rule over the Romans, and let us send their decree to this effect to the soldiers in the camp in all haste. For when those who have arms in their hands hear that the whole city is alienated from the tyrant they will become zealous for the liberty of their country and will no longer, as hitherto, be restrained by bribes or able to bear the insolent acts of the sons and flatterers of Tarquinius.” After he had spoken thus, Valerius took up the discussion and said: “In other respects you seem to me to reason well, Junius; but concerning the assembly of the people, I wish to know further who is to summon it according to law and propose the vote to the curiae. For this is the business of a magistrate and none of us holds a magistracy” To this Brutus answered: “I will, Valerius; for I am commander of the celeres and I have the power by law of calling an assembly of the people when I please.[1] The tyrant gave me this most important magistracy in the belief that I was a fool and either would not be aware of the power attaching to it or, if I did recognize it, would not use it. And I myself will deliver the first speech against the tyrant.”

LXXII. Upon hearing this they all applauded him for beginning with an honourable and lawful principle, and they asked him to tell the rest of his plans. And he continued: “Since you have resolved to follow this course, let us further consider what magistracy shall govern the commonwealth after the expulsion of the kings, and by what man it shall be created, and, even before that, what form of government we shall establish as we get rid of the tyrant. For it is better to have considered everything before attempting so important an undertaking and to have left nothing unexamined or unconsidered. Let each one of you, accordingly, declare his opinion concerning these matters.” After this many speeches were made by many different men. Some were of the opinion that they ought to establish a monarchical government again, and they recounted the great benefits the state had received from all the former kings. Others believed that they ought no longer to entrust the government to a single ruler, and they enumerated the tyrannical excesses which many other kings and Tarquinius, last of all, had committed against their own people; but they thought they ought to make the senate supreme in all matters, according to the practice of many Greek cities. And still others liked neither of these forms of government, but advised them to establish a democracy like that at Athens; they pointed to the insolence and avarice of the few and to the seditions usually stirred up by the lower classes against their superiors, and they declared that for a free commonwealth the equality of the citizens was of all forms of government the safest and the most becoming.

LXXIII. The choice appearing to all of them difficult and hard to decide upon by reason of the evils attendant upon each form of government, Brutus took up the discussion as the final speaker and said: “It is my opinion, Lucretius, Collatinus, and all of you here present, good men yourselves and descended from good men, that we ought not in the present situation to establish any new form of government. For the time to which we are limited by the circumstances is short, so that it is not easy to reform the constitution of the state, and the very attempt to change it, even though we should happen to be guided by the very best counsels, is precarious and not without danger. And besides, it will be possible later, when we are rid of the tyranny, to deliberate with greater freedom and at leisure and thus choose a better form of government in place of a poorer one—if, indeed, there is any constitution better than the one which Romulus, Pompilius and all the succeeding kings instituted and handed down to us, by means of which our commonwealth has continued to be great and prosperous and to rule over many subjects. But as for the evils which generally attend monarchies and because of which they degenerate into a tyrannical cruelty and are abhorred by all mankind, I advise you to correct these now and at the same time to take precautions that they shall never again occur hereafter. And what are these evils? In the first place, since most people look at the names of things and, influenced by them, either admit some that are hurtful or shrink from others that are useful, of which monarchy happens to be one, I advise you to change the name of the government and no longer to call those who shall have the supreme power either kings or monarchs, but to give them a more modest and humane title. In the next place, I advise you not to make one man’s judgment the supreme authority over all, but to entrust the royal power to two men, as I am informed the Lacedaemonians have been doing now for many generations, in consequence of which form of government they are said to be the best governed and the most prosperous people among the Greeks. For the rulers will be less arrogant and vexatious when the power is divided between two and each has the same authority; moreover, mutual respect, the ability of each to prevent the other from living as suits his pleasure, and a rivalry between them for the attainment of a reputation for virtue would be most likely to result from such equality of power and honour.

LXXIV. “And inasmuch as the insignia which have been granted to the kings are numerous, I believe that if any of these are grievous and invidious in the eyes of the multitude we ought to modify some of them and abolish others—I mean these sceptres and golden crowns, the purple and gold-embroidered robes—unless it be upon certain festal occasions and in triumphal processions, when the rulers will assume them in honour of the gods; for they will offend no one if they are seldom used. But I think we ought to leave to the men the ivory chair, in which they will sit in judgment, and also the white robe bordered with purple, together with the twelve axes to be carried before them when they appear in public. There is one thing more which in my opinion will be of greater advantage than all that I have mentioned and the most effectual means of preventing those who shall receive this magistracy from committing many errors, and that is, not to permit the same persons to hold office for life (for a magistracy unlimited in time and not obliged to give any account of its actions is grievous to all and productive of tyranny), but to limit the power of the magistracy to a year, as the Athenians do. For this principle, by which the same person both rules and is ruled in turn and surrenders his authority before his mind has been corrupted, restrains arrogant dispositions and does not permit men’s natures to grow intoxicated with power. If we establish these regulations we shall be able to enjoy all the benefits that flow from monarchy and at the same time to be rid of the evils that attend it. But to the end that the name, too, of the kingly power, which is traditional with us and made its way into our commonwealth with favourable auguries that manifested the approbation of the gods, may be preserved for form’s sake, let there always be appointed a king of sacred rites,[1] who shall enjoy this honour for life exempt from all military and civil duties and, like the “king” at Athens,[2] exercising this single function, the superintendence of the sacrifices, and no other.

LXXV. “In what manner each of these measures shall be effected I will now tell you. I will summon the assembly, as I said, since this power is accorded me by law, and will propose this resolution: That Tarquinius be banished with his wife and children, and that they and their posterity as well be forever debarred both from the city and from the Roman territory. After the citizens have passed this vote I will explain to them the form of government we propose to establish; next, I will choose an interrex to appoint the magistrates who are to take over the administration of public affairs, and I will then resign the command of the celeres. Let the interrex appointed by me call together the centuriate assembly, and having nominated the persons who are to hold the annual magistracy, let him permit the citizens to vote upon them; and if the majority of the centuries are in favour of ratifying his choice of men and the auguries concerning them are favourable, let these men assume the axes and the other insignia of royalty and see to it that our country shall enjoy its liberty and that the Tarquinii shall nevermore return. For they will endeavour, be assured, by persuasion, violence, fraud and every other means to get back into power unless we are upon our guard against them.

“These are the most important and essential measures that I have to propose to you at present and to advise you to adopt. As for the details, which are many and not easy to examine with precision at the present time (for we are brought to an acute crisis), I think we ought to leave them to the men themselves who are to take over the magistracy. But I do say that these magistrates ought to consult with the senate in everything, as the kings formerly did, and to do nothing without your advice, and that they ought to lay before the people the decrees of the senate, according to the practice of our ancestors, depriving them of none of the privileges which they possessed in earlier times. For thus their magistracy will be most secure and most excellent.”

LXXVI. After Junius Brutus had delivered this opinion they all approved it, and straightway consulting about the persons who were to take over the magistracies, they decided that Spurius Lucretius, the father of the woman who had killed herself, should be appointed interrex, and that Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus should be nominated by him to exercise the power of the kings. And they ordered that these magistrates should be called in their language consules; this, translated into the Greek language, may signify symbouloi (“counsellors”) or probouloi (“pre-counsellors”), for the Romans call our symboulai (“counsels”) consilia. But in the course of time they came to be called by the Greeks hypatoi (“supreme”) from the greatness of their power, because they command all the citizens and have the highest rank; for the ancients called that which was outstanding and superlative hypaton.Having discussed and settled these matters, they besought the gods to assist them in the pursuit of their holy and just aims, and then went to the Forum.[1] They were followed by their slaves, who carried upon a bier spread with black cloth the body of Lucretia, unprepared for burial and stained with blood; and directing them to place it in a high and conspicuous position before the senate-house, they called an assembly of the people. When a crowd had gathered, not only of those who were in the Forum at the time but also of those who came from all parts of the city (for the heralds had gone through all the streets to summon the people thither), Brutus ascended the tribunal from which it was the custom for those who assembled the people to address them, and having placed the patricians near him, spoke as follows:

LXXVII “Citizens,[1] as I am going to speak to you upon urgent matters of general interest, I desire first to say a few words about myself. For by some, perhaps, or more accurately, as I know, by many of you, I shall be thought to be disordered in my intellect when I, a man of unsound mind, attempt to speak upon matters of the greatest importance—a man who, as being not mentally sound, has need of guardians. Know, then, that the general opinion you all entertained of me as of a fool was false and contrived by me and by me alone. That which compelled me to live, not as my nature demanded or as beseemed me, but as was agreeable to Tarquinius and seemed likely to be to my own advantage, was the fear I felt for my life. For my father was put to death by Tarquinius upon his accession to the sovereignty, in order that he might possess himself of his property, which was very considerable, and my elder brother, who would have avenged his father’s death if he had not been put out of the way, was secretly murdered by the tyrant; nor was it clear that he would spare me, either, now left destitute of my nearest relations, if I had not pretended a folly that was not genuine. This fiction, finding credit with the tyrant, saved me from the same treatment that they had experienced and has preserved me to this day; but since the time has come at last which I have prayed for and looked forward to, I am now laying it aside for the first time, after maintaining it for twenty-five years. So much concerning myself.

LXXVIII. “The state of public affairs, because of which I have called you together, is this: Inasmuch as Tarquinius neither obtained the sovereignty in accordance with our ancestral customs and laws, nor, since he obtained it—in whatever manner he got it—has he been exercising it in an honourable or kingly manner, but has surpassed in insolence and lawlessness all the tyrants the world ever saw, we patricians met together and resolved to deprive him of his power, a thing we ought to have done long ago, but are doing now when a favourable opportunity has offered. And we have called you together, plebeians, in order to declare our own decision and then ask for your assistance in achieving liberty for our country, a blessing which we neither have hitherto been able to enjoy since Tarquinius obtained the sovereignty, nor shall hereafter be able to enjoy if we show weakness now. Had I as much time as I could wish, or were I about to speak to men unacquainted with the facts, I should have enumerated all the lawless deeds of the tyrant for which he deserves to die, not once, but many times, at the hands of all. But since the time permitted me by the circumstances is short, and in this brief time there is little that needs to be said but much to be done, and since I am speaking to those who are acquainted with the facts, I shall remind you merely of those of his deeds that are the most heinous and the most conspicuous and do not admit of any excuse.

LXXIX. “This is that Tarquinius, citizens, who, before he took over the sovereignty, destroyed his own brother Arruns by poison because he would not consent to become wicked, in which abominable crime he was assisted by his brother’s wife, the sister of his own wife, whom this enemy of the gods had even long before debauched. This is the man who on the same days and with the same poisons killed his wedded wife, a virtuous woman who had also been the mother of children by him, and did not even deign to clear himself of the blame for both of these poisonings and make it appear that they were not his work, by assuming a mourning garb and some slight pretence of grief; nay, close upon the heels of his committing those monstrous deeds and before the funeral-pyre which had received those miserable bodies had died away, he gave a banquet to his friends, celebrated his nuptials, and led the murderess of her husband as a bride to the bed of her sister, thus fulfilling the abominable contract he had made with her and being the first and the only man who ever introduced into the city of Rome such impious and execrable crimes unknown to any nation in the world, either Greek or barbarian. And how infamous and dreadful, plebeians, were the crimes he committed against both his parents-in-law when they were already in the sunset of their lives! Servius Tullius, the most excellent of your kings and your greatest benefactor, he openly murdered and would not permit his body to be honoured with either the funeral or the burial that were customary; and Tarquinia, the wife of Tullius, whom, as she was the sister of his father and had always shown great kindness to him, it was fitting that he should honour as a mother, he destroyed, unhappy woman, by the noose, without allowing her time to mourn her husband under the sod and to perform the customary sacrifices for him. Thus he treated those by whom he had been preserved, by whom he had been reared, and whom after their death he was to have succeeded if he had waited but a short time till death came to them in the course of nature.

LXXX. “But why do I censure these crimes committed against his relations and his kin by marriage when, apart from them, I have so many other unlawful acts of which to accuse him, which he has committed against his country and against us all—if, indeed, they ought to be called merely unlawful acts and not rather the subversion and extinction of all that is sanctioned by our laws and customs? Take, for instance, the sovereignty—to begin with that. How did he obtain it? Did he follow the example of the former kings? Far from it! The others were all advanced to the sovereignty by you according to our ancestral customs and laws, first, by a decree of the senate, which body has been given the right to deliberate first concerning all public affairs; next, by the appointment of interreges, whom the senate entrusts with the selection of the most suitable man from among those who are worthy of the sovereignty; after that, by a vote of the people in the comitia, by which vote the law requires that all matters of the greatest moment shall be ratified; and, last of all, by the approbation of the auguries, sacrificial victims and other signs, without which human diligence and foresight would be of no avail. Well, then, which of these things does any one of you know to have been done when Tarquinius was obtaining the sovereignty? What preliminary decree of the senate was there? What decision on the part of the interreges? What vote of the people? What favourable auguries? I do not ask whether all these formalities were observed, though it was necessary, if all was to be well, that nothing founded either in custom or in law should have been omitted; but if it can be shown that any one of them was observed, I am content not to quibble about those that were omitted. How, then, did he come to the sovereignty? By arms, by violence, and by the conspiracies of wicked men, according to the custom of tyrants, in spite of your disapproval and indignation. Well, but after he had obtained the sovereignty—in whatever manner he got it—did he use it in a fashion becoming a king, in imitation of his predecessors, whose words and actions were invariably such that they handed down the city to their successors more prosperous and greater than they themselves had received it? What man in his senses could say so, when he sees to what a pitiable and wretched state we all have been brought by him?

LXXXI. “I shall say nothing of the calamities we who are patricians have suffered, of which no one even of our enemies could hear without tears, since we are left but few out of many, have been brought low from having been exalted, and have come to poverty and dire want after being stripped of many enviable possessions. Of all those illustrious men, those great and able leaders because of whom our city was once distinguished, some have been put to death and others banished. But what is your condition, plebeians? Has not Tarquinius taken away your laws? Has he not abolished your assemblages for the performance of religious rites and sacrifices? Has he not put an end to your electing of magistrates, to your voting, and to your meeting in assembly to discuss public affairs? Does he not force you, like slaves purchased with money, to endure shameful hardships in quarrying stone, hewing timber, carrying burdens, and wasting your strength in deep pits and caverns, without allowing you the least respite from your miseries? What, then, will be the limit of our calamities? How long shall we submit to this treatment? And when shall we recover the liberty our fathers enjoyed? When Tarquinius dies? To be sure! And how shall we be in a better condition then? Why should it not be a worse? For we shall have three Tarquinii sprung from the one, all far more abominable than their sire. For when one who from a private station has become a tyrant and has begun late to be wicked, is an expert in all tyrannical mischief, what kind of men may we expect those to be who are sprung from him, whose parentage has been depraved, whose nurture has been depraved, and who never had an opportunity of seeing or hearing of anything done with the moderation befitting free citizens? In order, therefore, that you may not merely guess at their accursed natures, but may know with certainty what kind of whelps the tyranny of Tarquinius is secretly rearing up for your destruction, behold the deed of one of them, the eldest of the three.

LXXXII. “This woman is the daughter of Spurius Lucretius, whom the tyrant, when he went to the war, appointed prefect of the city,[1] and the wife of Tarquinius Collatinus, a kinsman of the tyrant who has undergone many hardships for their sake. Yet this woman, who desired to preserve her virtue and loved her husband as becomes a good wife, could not, when Sextus was entertained last night at her house as a kinsman and Collatinus was absent at the time in camp, escape the unbridled insolence of tyranny, but like a captive constrained by necessity, had to submit to indignities that it is not right any woman of free condition should suffer. Resenting this treatment and looking upon the outrage as intolerable, she related to her father and the rest of her kinsmen the straits to which she had been reduced, and after earnestly entreating and adjuring them to avenge the wrongs she had suffered, she drew out the dagger she had concealed under the folds of her dress and before her father’s very eyes, plebeians, plunged the steel into her vitals. O admirable woman and worthy of great praise for your noble resolution! You are gone, you are dead, being unable to bear the tyrant’s insolence and despising all the pleasures of life in order to avoid suffering any such indignity again. After this example, Lucretia, when you, who were given a woman’s nature, have shown the resolution of a brave man, shall we, who were born men, show ourselves inferior to women in courage? To you, because you had been deprived by force of your spotless chastity by submission to a tyrant during one night, death appeared sweeter and more blessed than life; and shall not the same feelings sway us, whom Tarquinius, by a tyranny, not of one day only, but of twenty-five years, has deprived of all the pleasures of life in depriving us of our liberty? Life is intolerable to us, plebeians, while we wallow amid such wretchedness—to us who are the descendants of those men who thought themselves worthy to give laws to others and exposed themselves to many dangers for the sake of power and fame. Nay, but we must all choose one of two things—life with liberty or death with glory. An opportunity has come such as we have been praying for. Tarquinius is absent from the city, the patricians are the leaders of the enterprise, and naught will be lacking to us if we enter upon the undertaking with zeal—neither men, money, arms, generals, nor any other equipment of warfare, for the city is full of all these; and it would be disgraceful if we, who aspire to rule the Volscians, the Sabines and countless other peoples, should ourselves submit to be slaves of others, and should undertake many wars to gratify the ambition of Tarquinius but not one to recover our own liberty.

LXXXIII. “What resources, therefore, what assistance shall we have for our undertaking? For this remains to be discussed. First there are the hopes we place in the gods, whose rites, temples and altars Tarquinius pollutes with hands stained with blood and denied with every kind of crime against his own people every time he begins the sacrifices and libations. Next, there are the hopes that we place in ourselves, who are neither few in number nor unskilled in war. Besides these advantages there are the forces of our allies, who, so long as they are not called upon by us, will not presume to busy themselves with our affairs, but if they see us acting the part of brave men, will gladly assist us in the war; for tyranny is odious to all who desire to be free. But if any of you are afraid that the citizens who are in the camp with Tarquinius will assist him and make war upon us, their fears are groundless. For the tyranny is grievous to them also and the desire of liberty is implanted by Nature in the minds of all men, and every excuse for a change is sufficient for those who are compelled to bear hardships; and if you by your votes order them to come to the aid of their country, neither fear nor favour, nor any of the other motives that compel or persuade men to commit injustice, will keep them with the tyrants. But if by reason of an evil nature or a bad upbringing the love of tyranny is, after all, rooted in some of them—though surely there are not many such—we will bring strong compulsion to bear upon these men too, so that they will become good citizens instead of bad. For we have, as hostages for them in the city, their children, wives and parents, who are dearer to every man than his own life. By promising to restore these to them if they will desert the tyrants, and by passing a vote of amnesty for the mistakes they have made, we shall easily prevail upon them to join us. Advance to the struggle, therefore, plebeians, with confidence and with good hopes for the future; for this war which you are about to undertake is the most glorious of all the wars you have ever waged. Ye gods of our ancestors, kindly guardians of this land, and ye other divinities, to whom the care of our fathers was allotted, and thou City, dearest to the gods of all cities, the city in which we received our birth and nurture, we shall defend you with our counsels, our words, our hands and our lives, and we are ready to suffer everything that Heaven and Fate shall bring. And I predict that our glorious endeavours will be crowned with success. May all here present, emboldened by the same confidence and united in the same sentiments, both preserve us and and be preserved by us!”

LXXXIV. While Brutus was thus addressing the people everything he said was received by them with continual acclamations signifying both their approval and their encouragement. Most of them even wept with pleasure at hearing these wonderful and unexpected words, and various emotions, in no wise resembling one another, affected the mind of each of his hearers. For pain was mingled with pleasure, the former arising from the terrible experiences that were past and the latter from the blessings that were anticipated; and anger went hand in hand with fear, the former encouraging them to despise their own safety in order to injure the objects of their hatred, while the latter, occasioned by the thought of the difficulty of overthrowing the tyranny, inspired them with reluctance toward the enterprise. But when he had done speaking, they all cried out, as from a single mouth, to lead them to arms. Then Brutus, pleased at this, said: “On this condition, that you first hear the resolution of the senate and confirm it. For we have resolved that the Tarquinii and all their posterity shall be banished both from the city of Rome and from all the territory ruled by the Romans; that no one shall be permitted to say or do anything about their restoration; and that if anyone shall be found to be working contrary to these decisions he shall be put to death. If it is your pleasure that this resolution be confirmed, divide yourselves into your curiae and give your votes; and let the enjoyment of this right be the beginning of your liberty.” This was done; and all the curiae having given their votes for the banishment of the tyrants, Brutus again came forward and said: “Now that our first measures have been confirmed in the manner required, hear also what we have further resolved concerning the form of our government. It was our decision, upon considering what magistracy should be in control of affairs, not to establish the kingship again, but to appoint two annual magistrates to hold the royal power, these men to be whomever you yourselves shall choose in the comitia, voting by centuries. If, therefore, this also is your pleasure, give your votes to that effect.” The people approved of this resolution likewise, not a single vote being given against it. After that, Brutus, coming forward, appointed Spurius Lucretius as interrex to preside over the comitia for the election of magistrates, according to ancestral custom. And he, dismissing the assembly, ordered all the people to go promptly in arms to the field[1] where it was their custom to elect their magistrates. When they were come thither, he chose two men to perform the functions which had belonged to the kings—Brutus and Collatinus; and the people, being called by centuries, confirmed their appointment.[2] Such were the measures taken in the city at that time.

LXXXV. As[3] soon as King Tarquinius heard by the first messengers who had found means to escape from the city before the gates were shut that Brutus was holding the assembled people enthralled, haranguing them and summoning the citizens to liberty, which was all the information they could give him, he took with him his sons and the most trustworthy of his friends, and without communicating his design to any others, rode at full gallop in hopes of forestalling the revolt. But finding the gates shut and the battlements full of armed men, he returned to the camp as speedily as possible, bewailing and complaining of his misfortune. But his cause there also was now lost. For the consuls, foreseeing that he would quickly come to the city, had sent letters[1]by other roads to those in the camp, in which they exhorted them to revolt from the tyrant and acquainted them with the resolutions passed by those in the city. Titus Herminius and Marcus Horatius, who had been left by the king to command in his absence, having received these letters, read them in an assembly of the soldiers; and asking them by their centuries what they thought should be done, when it was their unanimous opinion to regard the decisions reached by those in the city as valid, they no longer would admit Tarquinius when he returned. After the king found himself disappointed of this hope also, he fled with a few companions to the city of Gabii, over which, as I said before, he had appointed Sextus, the eldest of his sons, to be king. He was now grown grey with age and had reigned twenty-five years. In the meantime Herminius and Horatius, having made a truce with the Ardeates for fifteen years, led their forces home.[2]

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Ovid, Fasti: LCL 253

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BCE–17 CE), born at Sulmo, studied rhetoric and law at Rome. Later he did considerable public service there, and otherwise devoted himself to poetry and to society. Famous at first, he offended the emperor Augustus by his Ars Amatoria, and was banished because of this work and some other reason unknown to us, and dwelt in the cold and primitive town of Tomis on the Black Sea. He continued writing poetry, a kindly man, leading a temperate life. He died in exile.

Ovid’s main surviving works are the Metamorphoses, a source of inspiration to artists and poets including Chaucer and Shakespeare; the Fasti, a poetic treatment of the Roman year of which Ovid finished only half; the Amores, love poems; the Ars Amatoria, not moral but clever and in parts beautiful; Heroides, fictitious love letters by legendary women to absent husbands; and the dismal works written in exile: the Tristia, appeals to persons including his wife and also the emperor; and similar Epistulae ex Ponto. Poetry came naturally to Ovid, who at his best is lively, graphic and lucid.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ovid is in six volumes.

Fasti, Book II

VI. Kal. 24th^685 Now have I to tell of the Flight of the King[d]: from it the sixth day from the end of the month has taken its name. The last to reign over the Roman people was Tarquin, a man unjust, yet puissant in arms. He had taken some cities and overturned others, and had made Gabii his own by foul play.[e] For the king’s three sons the youngest, true scion of his proud sire, came in the silent night into the midst of the foes. They drew their swords. “Slay an unarmed man!” said he. “’Tis what my brothers would desire, aye and Tarquin, my sire, who gashed my back with cruel scourge.” In order that he might urge this plea, he had submitted to a scourging. The moon shone. They beheld the youth and sheathed their swords, for they saw the scars on his back, where he drew down his robe. They even wept and begged that he would side with them in war. The cunning knave assented to their unwary suit. No sooner was he installed in power than he sent a friend to ask his father to show him the way of destroying Gabii. Below the palace lay a garden trim of odoriferous plants, whereof the ground was cleft by a brook of purling water: there Tarquin received the secret message of his son, and with his staff he mowed the tallest lilies. When the messenger returned and told of the cropped lilies, “I take,” quoth the son, “my father’s bidding.” Without delay, he put to the sword the chief men of the city of Gabii and surrendered the walls, now bereft of their native leaders.

711 Behold, Ο horrid sight! from between the altars a snake came forth and snatched the sacrificial meat from the dead fires. Phoebus was consulted.[a] An oracle was delivered in these terms: “He who shall first have kissed his mother will be victorious.” Each one of the credulous company, not understanding the god, hasted to kiss his mother. The prudent Brutus feigned to be a fool, in order that from thy snares, Tarquin the Proud, dread king, he might be safe; lying prone he kissed his mother Earth, but they thought he had stumbled and fallen. Meantime the Roman legions had compassed Ardea, and the city suffered a long and lingering siege. While there was naught to do, and the foe feared to join battle, they made merry in the camp; the soldiers took their ease. Young Tarquin[a] entertained his comrades with feast and wine: among them the king’s son spake: “While Ardea keeps us here on tenterhooks with sluggish war, and suffers us not to carry back our arms to the gods of our fathers, what of the loyalty of the marriage-bed? and are we as dear to our wives as they to us?” Each praised his wife: in their eagerness dispute ran high, and every tongue and heart grew hot with the deep draughts of wine. Then up and spake the man who from Collatia took his famous name[b]: “No need of words! Trust deeds! There’s night enough. To horse! and ride we to the City.” The saying pleased them; the steeds are bridled and bear their masters to the journey’s end. The royal palace first they seek: no sentinel was at the door. Lo, they find the king’s daughters-in-law, their necks draped with garlands, keeping their vigils over the wine. Thence they galloped to Lucretia, before whose bed were baskets full of soft wool. By a dim light the handmaids were spinning their allotted stints of yarn. Amongst them the lady spoke on accents soft: “Haste ye now, haste, my girls! The cloak our hands have wrought must to your master be instantly dispatched. But what news have ye? For more news comes your way. How much do they say of the war is yet to come? Hereafter thou shalt be vanquished and fall: Ardea, thou dost resist thy betters, thou jade, that keepest perforce our husbands far away! If only they came back! But mine is rash, and with drawn sword he rushes anywhere. I faint, I die, oft as the image of my soldier spouse steals on my mind and strikes a chill into my breast.” She ended weeping, dropped the stretched yarn, and buried her face in her lap. The gesture was becoming; becoming, too, her modest tears; her face was worthy of its peer, her soul. “Fear not, I’ve come,” her husband said. She revived and on her spouse’s neck she hung, a burden sweet.

761 Meantime the royal youth caught fire and fury, and transported by blind love he raved. Her figure pleased him, and that snowy hue, that yellow hair, and artless grace; pleasing, too, her words and voice and virtue incorruptible; and the less hope he had, the hotter his desire. Now had the bird, the herald of the dawn, uttered his chant, when the young men retraced their steps to camp. Meantime the image of his absent love preyed on his senses crazed. In memory’s light more fair and fair she grew. “’Twas thus she sat, ’twas thus she dressed, ’twas thus she spun the yarn, ’twas thus her tresses lay fallen on her neck; that was her look, these were her words, that was her colour, that her form, and that her lovely face.” As after a great gale the surge subsides, and yet the billow heaves, lashed by the wind now fallen, so, though absent now that winsome form and far away, the love which by its presence it had struck into his heart remained. He burned, and, goaded by the pricks of an unrighteous love, he plotted violence and guile against an innocent bed. “The issue is in doubt. We’ll dare the utmost,” said he. “Let her look to it! God and fortune help the daring. By daring we captured Gabii too.”

784 So saying he girt his sword at his side and bestrode his horse’s back. The bronze-bound gate of Collatia opened for him just as the sun was making ready to hide his face. In the guise of a guest the foe found his way into the home of Collatinus. He was welcomed kindly, for he came of kindred blood. How was her heart deceived! All unaware she, hapless dame, prepared a meal for her own foes. His repast over, the hour of slumber came. ’Twas night, and not a taper shone in the whole house. He rose, and from the gilded scabbard he drew his sword, and came into thy chamber, virtuous spouse. And when he touched the bed, “The steel is in my hand, Lucretia,” said the king’s son “and I that speak am a Tarquin.” She answered never a word. Voice and power of speech and thought itself fled from her breast. But she trembled, as trembles a little lamb that, caught straying from the fold, lies low under a ravening wolf. What could she do? Should she struggle? In a struggle a woman will always be worsted. Should she cry out? But in his clutch was a sword to silence her. Should she fly? His hands pressed heavy on her breast, the breast that till then had never known the touch of stranger hand. Her lover foe is urgent with prayers, with bribes, with threats; but still he cannot move her by prayers, by bribes, by threats. “Resistance is vain,” said he, “I’ll rob thee of honour and of life. I, the adulterer, will bear false witness to thine adultery. I’ll kill a slave, and rumour will have it that thou wert caught with him.” Overcome by fear of infamy, the dame gave way. Why, victor, dost thou joy? This victory will ruin thee. Alack, how dear a single night did cost thy kingdom!

And now the day had dawned. She sat with hair dishevelled, like a mother who must attend the funeral pyre of her son. Her aged sire and faithful spouse she summoned from the camp, and both came without delay. When they saw her plight, they asked why she mourned, whose obsequies she was preparing, or what ill had befallen her. She was long silent, and for shame hid her face in her robe: her tears flowed like a running stream. On this side and on that her father and her spouse did soothe her grief and pray her to tell, and in blind fear they wept and quaked. Thrice she essayed to speak, and thrice gave o’er, and when the fourth time she summoned up courage she did not for that lift up her eyes. “Must I owe this too to Tarquin? Must I utter,” quoth she, “must I utter, woe’s me, with my own lips my own disgrace?” And what she can she tells. The end she left unsaid, but wept and a blush o’erspread her matron cheeks. Her husband and her sire pardoned the deed enforced. She said, “The pardon that you give, I do refuse myself.” Without delay, she stabbed her breast with the steel she had hidden, and weltering in her blood fell at her father’s feet. Even then in dying she took care to sink down decently: that was her thought even as she fell. Lo, heedless of appearances, the husband and father fling themselves on her body, moaning their common loss. Brutus came, and then at last belied his name; for from the half-dead body he snatched the weapon stuck in it, and holding the knife, that dripped with noble blood, he fearless spake these words of menace: “By this brave blood and chaste, and by thy ghost, who shall be god to me, I swear to be avenged on Tarquin and on his banished brood. Too long have I dissembled my manly worth.” At these words, even as she lay, she moved her lightless eyes and seemed by the stirring of her hair to ratify the speech. They bore her to burial, that matron of manly courage; and tears and indignation followed in her train. The gaping wound was exposed for all to see. With a cry Brutus assembled the Quirites and rehearsed the king’s foul deeds. Tarquin and his brood were banished. A consul undertook the government for a year. That day was the last of kingly rule.

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Joshel, Sandra. 2002. “The Female Body and the Body Politic: Livy’s Lucretia and Verginia”

[Page numbers in this text appear at the top of their pages.]

Brutus, while the others were absorbed in grief, drew out the knife from Lucretia’s wound, and holding it up, dripping with gore, exclaimed, “By this blood most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear, and I take you, gods, to witness, that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and his wicked wife and all his children, with sword, with fire, aye with whatsoever violence I may; and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome!”   -Livy 1.59.1, LCL1

Reality, robbed of its independent life, is shaped anew, kneaded into large, englobing blocks that will serve as the building material for a larger vista, a monumental world of the future …. Empires can be built only on, and out of, dead matter. Destroyed life provides the material for their building blocks. -Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies

Pretext: The Conditions of a Reading

I read Livy’s history of Rome’s origins, its earliest struggles with neighboring states, and the political events that formed the state that conquered an empire. The historian writes within an immediate past he regards as decadent, a fall from the glorious society of ancestors who made empire possible; he stands at a point where his Rome is about to be reinvigorated by a new imperial order\ Raped, dead, or disappeared women litter the pages. The priestess Rh􀀲a Silvia, raped by the god Mars, gives birth to Rome’s founder, Romulus, and leaves the story. The women of the neighboring Sabines are seized as wives by Romulus’s wifeless men. When the Sabine soldiers come to do battle with the Romans, the Roman girl Tarpeia betrays her own menfolk by admitting their foes into the citadel. She is slain by the enemy she helped. By contrast, the Sabine women place their bodies between their kin and their husbands, offering to take on the violence the men would do to each other.

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Later, a young woman, named only as sister, is murdered by her brother Horatius because she mourns the fiance he killed in single combat. “So perish every Roman woman who mourns a foe!” he declares, and their father agrees that she was justly slain. Lucretia, raped by the king’s son, calls on her menfolk to avenge her and commits suicide. The men overthrow the monarchy. Verginia, threatened with rape by a ty rannical magistrate, is killed by her father to prevent her violation. The citizen body ousts the magistrate and his colleagues. In these stories of early Rome, the death and disappearance of women recur periodically; the rape of women becomes the history of the state. 2

I read Klaus Theweleit’s study of Freikorps narratives, written by “soldier males” who would become active Nazis. They write of World War I, of battling Reds, of living in a time they experience as chaotic 􀀛nd decadent in a Germany fallen from former greatness. Dead, disappeared, and silent women litter their texts. Sexually active working-class and communist women are slain brutally; chaste wives and sisters are made antiseptic, are killed tragically, or do not speak.
And I read Livy and Theweleit in the United States in the summer of 1987, at a time when the title of a recent Canadian film evokes what is often not explicit-The Decline of the American Empire. A time of concern about American power abroad and American life at home. The war against drugs and the battle against uncontrolled sex. Betsy North, Donna Rice, and Vanna White litter the TV screen, newspapers, and magazines. Betsy, silent and composed, sits behind her ramrodstraight husband, stiff and immaculate in his Marine uniform. Donna Rice appears in private, now public, photographs with Gary Hart; she has nothing to say. He gives up his candidacy for the presidency, guilty of extramarital sex. Vanna White turns letters on the popular game show “Wheel of Fortune.” She does speak. “I enjoy getting dressed as a Barbie doll,” she tells an interviewer. An image on our TV screens gotten up like a doll that simulates a nonexistent woman named Barbie, she is rematerialized by her dress in some sort of fetishistic process: “Speaking of Vanna White, a polyester magenta dress, one worn by the celebrated letter-turner, is on display at a Seattle espresso bar, where fans may touch it for 25 cents” (Boston Globe, June 9, 1987).

I look here at gender relations and images of women in Livy’s history of early Rome, focusing on his tales of Lucretia and Verginia, but I do so within my own present. Freikorps narratives and the current mediascape are _the “conditions of my narrative,” to borrow a phrase from Christa Wolf. I am not equating Rome, Fascist Germany, and the United States of the 1980s; nor am I making the images of women in their histories and fictions exactly analogous. By juxtaposing images, I raise questions about the representations of gender within visions of building and collapsing empires. As Theweleit suggests of fascism, the Roman fiction should be understood and combated not “because it might ‘return again,’ but primarily because, as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, it can, and does, become our production” (1987: 221). Whether our own fictions include tales similar to Lucretia’s and Verginia’s with names changed or whether, as academics, we dissect Livy’s tales, we retell the stories, bringing their gender images and relations into our present (cf. Theweleit 1987: 265-89, 359).

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Livy and the Conditions of His Narrative

Livy (64 B.C.-A.D. 12) lived through the change from aristocratic Republic to Principate, a military dictatorship disguised in republican forms. For more than a century before Livy’s birth, Rome’s senatorial class had ruled an empire; by the time of his death, Rome, its political elite, and the empire were governed by one man. He grew up during the civil wars that marked the end of the Republic, and his adult years saw the last struggle of military dynasts, Octavian and Antony, and the reign of the first emperor, the victor in that struggle. Raised in a Padua known for its traditional morality, Livy was a provincial; he did not belong to the senatorial class and was uninvolved in politics, although he did have friendly relations with the imperial family (Ogilvie 1965: 1-5; Walsh 1961; Syme 1959; see J. Phillips 1982: 1028, for bibliography).

Livy wrote the early books of his history after Octavian’s victory over Antony and during the years in which Octavian became Augustus princeps-in effect, emperor (J. Phillips 1982: 1029, for the debate on the precise date). Shortly afterward came Augustus’s restoration of the state religion and his program of social and moral reform which included new laws on marriage and adultery aimed primarily at the upper classes. The adultery law made sexual relations between a married woman and a man other than her husband a criminal offense. Ineffective and unpopular, the law nonetheless indicates the regime’s concern with regulating sexuality, especially female (see Dixon 1988: 71ff). The program was to return Rome to its ancestral traditions, renew its imperial greatness, and refound the state.

The state to be refounded was a Rome uncorrupted by wealth and luxury, greed and license, the supposed conditions of the late Republic. The stories in which Lucretia and Verginia figure record critical points in that state’s formation, marking the origin of political and social forms which, along with the behavior of heroes, account for Rome’s greatness and its rise to imperial power. The rape of Lucretia precipitates the fall of the monarchy and establishment of the Republic and the Roman version of liberty. The attempted rape of Verginia belongs to a struggle between privileged and unprivileged groups (patricians and plebeians) known as the Conflict of the Orders; the event resulted in the overthrow of the decemvirs, officials who had abused their original mission of codifying the law, and began a long process of reform that eventually changed the form of Roman political institutions.

To modern historians, Livy’s stories of Lucretia and Verginia are myths or, at best, legends that include some memory of actual events. Current historical reconstructions of Rome in the late sixth and mid-fifth centuries B.c., the society in which Lucretia and Verginia are supposed to have lived, depend on archaeology, some early documents, antiquarian notices in later authors (Heurgon 1973; Gjerstad 1973; Bloch 1965; Raaflaub 1986 for historical methodology)’, and􀀠 as has recently been suggested, the “structural facts” obtained when Livy’s accounts have been stripped of their “narrative superstructure” (Cornell 1986: 61-76, esp. 73; Raaflaub 1986: 49-50). This evidence usually leaves us without a narrative. or the names of agents (see Raaflaub 1986: 13-16). But Livy invented neither the outline of events nor the characters in his stories. First written down in the third and second centuries B. c. , the tales were perpetuated as part of a living historical tradition by Roman writers of

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the early first century B.C. who were the major sources for Livy’s retelling (for Livy’s use of his sources, see Ogilvie 1965; Walsh 1961; Luce 1977). The history of the roughly contemporary Dionysius of Halicamassus allows us to see how Livy used the tradition.

This tradition “was neither an authenticated official record nor an objective critical reconstruction, but rather an ideological construct, designed to control, to justify, and to inspire” (Cornell 1986: 58). For historian and audience, the past provided the standards by which to judge the present: the deeds of great ancestors offered models for imitation and supported the claims of the ruling class to political privilege and power. Each historian infused his version.of events with his own (and his class’s) literary, moral, and political concerns. The past, Cornell notes, “was subject to a process of continuous transformation as each generation reconstructed the past in its own image” (1986: 58). For many modem historians, Livy’s account of early Rome better reflects the late Republic than the late sixth and fifth centuries B.c. (Raaflaub 1986: 23).

Even if we view Livy’s “description of the monarchy and early Republic as prose epics or historical novels” (Raaflaub 1986: 8), we should not ignore the power of his fictions of Lucretia and Verginia. For Livy, they were history, and, as history, they should inform a way of life in an imperial Rome ripe for refounding. In good Roman fashion, Livy views history as a repository of illustrative behaviors and their results: “What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that you behold the lessons of every kind of experience set forth on a conspicuous monument; from these you may choose for yourself and for your state what to imitate, from these mark for avoidance what is shameful in conception and shameful in the result” (praef. IO, LCL). Before he begins his historical narrative per se, Livy urges a particular kind of reading. His stories will proffer an array of subject positions, beliefs, and bodily practices. The reader should recognize and identify with them and should understand the consequences of assuming particular subject positions. Bodily practices fit into a vision of building and collapsing empire: some result in imperial power; others bring decadence and destruction. The reader should pay close attention to “what life and morals were like; through what men and by what policies, in peace and in war, empire was established and enlarged; then let him note how, with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first gave way, as it were, then sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure” (praef. 9, LCL).

Thus, the question for us is not whether victims, villains, and heroes are fictional, but the way Livy tells their story, offering up a blueprint for his imperial present.

Livy’s Stories of Lucretia and Verginia:
Rape, Death, and Roman History

Lucretia and the Fall of the Monarchy (1.57-60)

In 509 B.c., the king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, wages war on Ardea in the hope that the booty with lessen the peoples resentment at the labour he has

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imposed on them. During the siege of the city, at a drinking party, the king’s sons and their kinsman Collatinus argue over who has the best wife. On Collatinus’s suggestion, they decide to settle the question by seeing what their wives are doing. They find the princes’ wives enjoying themselves at a banquet with their friends; Collatinus’s wife, Lucretia, surrounded by her maids, spins by lamplight in her front hall. Lucretia makes her husband the victor in the wife contest. One of the princes, Sextus Tarquinius, inflamed by Lucretia’s beauty and her proven chastity, is seized by a desire to have her. A few days later, without Collatinus’s knowledge, he returns to Collatia, where he is welcomed as a guest. That night when the household is asleep, he draws his sword and wakes the sleeping Lucretia. Neither his declarations of love nor his threats of murder nor his pleas move the chaste Lucretia. She submits only when he threatens to create an appearance of disgraceful behavior: he will kill her and a slave and leave the slave’s naked body next to hers, so that it will look as if they had been slain in the act of adultery. 3 After the rape, she sends for her husband and her father, instructing them to come with a trusted friend (Collatinus brings Lucius Junius Brutus). To her husband’s question “Is it well with you?” she answers, “What can be well with a woman who has lost her chastity? The mark of another man is in your bed. My body only is violated; my mind is guiltless; death will be my witness. Swear that the adulterer will be punished-he is Sextus Tarquinius.” The men swear and try to console her, arguing that the mind sins, not the body. She responds, “You will determine what is due him. As for me, although I acquit myself of fault, I do not free myself from punishment. No unchaste woman will live with Lucretia as a precedent.” Then she kills herself with a knife she had hidden beneath her robe. While her husband and father grieve, Brutus draws the weapon from Lucretia’s body and swears on her blood to destroy the monarchy. Lucretia’s body, taken into the public square of Collatia, stirs the populace; Brutus incites the men to take up arms and overthrow the king. Brutus marches to Rome, and in the Forum the story of Lucretia and Brutus’s speech have the same effect. The king is exiled, the monarchy ended; the Republic begins with the election of two consuls, Brutus and Collatinus.

Verginia and the Fall of the Decemvirate (3.44-58)

In 450 B.c., the decemvirs have taken control of the state. They have displaced the consuls and the tribunes, protectors of the rights of plebeians. The chief decemvir, Appius Claudius, desires the beautiful young Verginia, daughter of the plebeian centurion Lucius Verginius. When Appius fails to seduce her with money or promises, he arranges to have Marcus Claudius, his cliens (a dependent tied to a more powerful man or an ex-master), claim Verginia as his (Marcus’s) slave while her father is away at war (apparently the client will give the young woman to his patron Appius). Marcus grabs Verginia as she enters the Forum. When the cries of her nurse draw a crowd, Marcus hauls her before Appius’s court. The decemvir postpones his decision until her father arrives but orders Verginia turned over to the man who claims her as his slave until the case can be tried. An impassioned speech by Verginia’s fiance Icilius incites the crowd; Appius rescinds his order. The next day, Verginius leads his daughter into the Forum, seeking support from the crown.

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Unmoved by appeals or weeping women, Appius adjudges Verginia a slave, but he grants Verginius’s request for a moment to question his daughter’s nurse in Verginia’s presence. Verginius leads his daughter away. Grabbing a knife from a butcher’s shop, he cries, “In the only way I can, my daughter, I claim your freedom,” and kills her. Icilius and Publius Numitorius, Verginia’s grandfather(?), show the lifeless body to the populace and stir them to action. Verginius escapes .to the army, where his bloodstained clothes, the knife, and his speech move his fellow soldiers to revolt. The decemvirate is overthrown, and when the tribunate is restored, Verginia ‘s father, fiance, and grandfather (?) are elected to office.

Flood: Bodily Desire and Political Catastrophe

Livy’s narrative of Rome’s political transformation revolves around chaste, innocent women raped and killed for the sake of preserving the virtue of the body female and the body politic; Roman men stirred to action by men who take control; and lustful villains whose desires result in their own destruction. Although the basic elements of Rome’s early legends were present in Livy’s sources, he could have dispensed with the tales in abbreviated fashion or minimized the role of women in stories of political change. Instead, he carefully constructs tragedies, drawing on all the literary techniques and models so meticulously noted by scholars (Ogilvie 1965: 218-32, 476-88; J. Phillips 1982: 1036-37 for bibliography). Why this writing of Roman history in Livy’s present?

Livy’s view of the immediate past engages him in Rome’s ancient history. He elaborates that history, because he finds pleasure in it and relief from recent civil war, social upheaval, and military disaster:

To most readers the earliest origins and the period immediately succeeding them will give little pleasure, for they will be in haste to reach these modem times, in which the might of a people which has long been very powerful is working its own undoing. I myself, on the contrary, shall seek in this an additional reward for my toil, that I may avert my gaze from the troubles which our age has been witnessing for so many years, so long at least as I am absorbed in the recollection of the brave days of old. (praej. 5, LCL)

“The troubles” haunted male authors of the first century B.c.-Sallust, Cicero, Horace, and Livy himself. As in the imagination of Theweleit’s Freikorps writers, political chaos and military failure are associated with immorality. Although this vision is familiar to modem historians of ancient Rome, the strikingly similar images of chaos and men’s experience in Weimar Germany compel reconsideration of the Roman images. I attend here only to how two elements, marked in these tales of origin, both deaden and kill: male excess and female unchastity.
Ancient authors attributed the crises of the late Republic to political ambition and to male bodies out of control in the social world, guilty of, in Livy’s words, luxus, avaritia, libido, cupiditas, abundantes voluptates (luxurious living, avarice, lust immoderate desires, excessive pleasures) Uncontrolled bodies being _____

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ruin and general disaster (praef. 11-12). For his contemporary Horace (Odes 3.6.19-20; cf. 1.2), disaster floods country and people. The body and its pleasures are present only as excess in this vision. The slightest infraction seems dangerous. A single vice can slip into another or into a host of moral flaws, as in Livy’s description of Tarquinius Superbus and his son Sextus (Phillipides 1983: 114, 117). Any desire becomes avarice or lust and must be rooted out.

The seeds of vicious avarice
must be rooted up, and our far too delicate
characters must be moulded by
sterner training.

-Horace, Odes 3.24.51-54 (trans. J. P. Clancy)

Men of the Freikorps feared a “Red” flood affecting the entire society, “piercing through the ancient dam of traditional state authority” (Theweleit 1987: 231; see 385 ff., esp. 392, for Freikorps images of chaos). It “brought all of the worse instincts to the surface, washing them up on the land” (Theweleit 1987: 231). Ultimately, comments Theweleit (231), this flood flows “from inside of those from whom the constraint of the old order has been removed.” A man could feel “powerless” and “defenseless” before what flows-fearful yet fascinated. The flood solidifies in a morass; men can hardly extract themselves from a mire that softness produces within them (404, 388). Indulgence must be rooted out: “If you want to press on forward, you cannot allow this mire of failure of the will to form inside you. The most humane way is still to go for the beast’s throat, to pull the thing out by its roots” (388). The “defense against suffocation in flabby self-indulgence and capriciousness” (389) lies in toughness and self-control: men should “stand fast … think of, and believe in, the nation” (405).

Livy focuses on what he imagines to be the ancient and necessary virtue of the soldier: disciplina. Roman tradition offered him tales of discipline instilled by floggings, sons executed by fathers to preserve disciplina for the state, and men hardened to fight both the enemy without and the weakness within themselves (see Valerius Maximus, 2.7.1-15, esp. 2.7.6, 2.7.9, 2.7.10). Neither exceptional bravery nor victory’ should be allowed to undermine disciplina. When Livy’s Manlius Torquatus orders the execution of his own son because, although successful in battle, he had ignored a direct order that no one was to engage the enemy, he makes the execution and the sacrifice of his own feelings a model for future generations of Roman men:

As you have held in reverence neither consular authority nor a father’s dignity, and … have broken military discipline, whereby the Roman state has stood until this day unshaken, thus compelling me to forget either the Republic or myself, we will sooner endure the punishment of our wrong-doing than suffer the Republic to expiate our sins at a cost so heavy to herself; we will set a stern example, but a salutary one, for the young men of the future. For my own part, I am moved, not only by a man’s instinctive love of his children, but by this instance you have given of your bravery. . . . But . . . the authority of the consuls must either be established by your death, or by your impunity be forever abrogated, and … I think

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your punishment the military discipline which through your misdemeanour has slipped and fallen. (8.7.15-19, LCL)

Whatever his motives (8. 7.4-8), the son had not simply disobeyed his commander and father; implicitly, he had failed to maintain the necessary self-control.

In Livy’s view, control must be absolute. A slight crack in the edifice brings down the entire structure. Disciplina resulted in conquest; its gradual relaxation precipitated a slide, then collapse (praef. 9)-personal, social, political. A man, and Rome, would seem to have a choice between obdurate victor and pusillanimous loser, between fighter and pulp in the Freikorps vision (cf. Valerius Maximus, 2.7.9 and Theweleit 1987: 395).

The heroes of Livy’s history, the men who act when women are made dead, are disciplined and unyielding. Noble Brutus chastised men for their tears and idle complaints (1.59.4) when they lamented Lucretia’s death and their own miseries. He urged them as men and Romans to take up arms. Later, he would administer as consul and suffer as father the scourging and execution of his own sons as traitors. Founder of the Republic and the consulship, he is a model for future consuls and fathers, like Torquatus, whose defense of the state’s tradition and existence will require dead sons and numbed affections. No luxus here or in the likes of Cocles, Scaevola, and Cincinnatus. These men are stem and self-controlled, bodies hardened to protect Rome and fight its wars. They must have been to have become the foremost people of the world (praef. 3)-the rulers of world empire. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, Trojan ancestor of the Romans, conceived within a few years of Livy’s heroes, they endure pain and adversity to create a Rome whose imperial power is portrayed as destiny (Aeneid 1.261-79): “so great was the effort to found the Roman race” (Aeneid 1.33). So disciplined, so self-controlled, so annealed, the body as a living, feeling, perceiving entity almost disappears.

Livy’s instructions to imitate virtue and avoid vice invoke the mos maiorum the way of the ancestors as a guide for the present. Bodily excess as manifested in the lust of Tarquin and Appius Claudius brings personal ruin and the collapse of their governments. Not incidentally, at the same time, Rome’s wars with its neighbors are waged unsuccessfully. Tarquin desires Lucretia during the inactivity (otium) of a long siege which is blamed on the king’s extravagance and his consequent need for booty. His avarice and his son’s lust become “two sides of the same coin, a metaphor of the City’s moral sickness,” and explain Rome’s military failure (Phillipides 1983: 114-15). For the sake of Rome’s martial and moral health, father and son as desiring agents must go (Phillipides 1983: 114). The actions of disciplined men like Brutus result in personal success and Roman power. They set the example for Livy’s present: the male body must be indifferent to material and sexual desire.

So Woman poses a particular problem.4 The Roman discourse on chaos often joins loose women with male failure to control various appetites. 5 Uncontrolled female sexuality was associated with moral decay, and both were seen as the roots of social chaos, civil war, and military failure.

Breeder of vices, our age has polluted

first marriage vows and the children and the home;

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from this spring, a river of ruin

has flooded our country [patria, lit. “fatherland”] and our people.

-Horace, Odes 3.6.17-20 (trans. J.P. Clancy)

Livy’s view of control makes it appropriate that his narrative tends toward a simple dichotomous vision of female sexuality: woman is or is not chaste.

This vision may account for the satisfaction Livy’s tales find in the point of the knife. Where he omits words about forced penetration, he offers a precise image of the dagger piercing Lucretia’s body and her death (1.58.11; cf. Verginia, 3.48.5). Perhaps that knife is aimed at “any unchaste woman,” real or imagined, of Livy’s age (cf. Freikorps worship of asexual “high-born” women and attack on sexual “low-born” women; Theweleit 1987: 79 ff., 315 ff., esp. 367). In Rome’s imagined past, the knife constructs absolute control. It eradicates unchastity and kills any anomaly in female sexuality, such as the contradiction between Lucretia’s violated body and her guiltless mind, or the blurring between the “good” and the “evil” woman (see Theweleit 1987: 183).

In Livy, the “good” woman’s threatening element is her attractiveness. While Livy never explicitly questions the innocence and chaste spirit of Verginia or Lucretia, the beauty of each woman is marked and explains the rapists’ actions. Lust seizes each man, as if desire originated outside him in beauty (1.57 .10; 3 .44.2). If, as the object of desire, a woman’s beauty is the condition of male lust, then good as well as evil men are potentially affected. Her existence threatens men’s disciplina. “The affective mode of self-defense in which [the annihilation of women] occurs seems to be made up of fear and desire” (Theweleit 1987: 183). Once Woman has played her role-to attract the villain whose actions set in motion other active males who construct the state, empire, and therefore history in the Roman sense-she must go.

As Theweleit suggests, what is at issue in this construction is male uncontrol. “What really started swimming were the men’s boundaries-the boundaries of their perceptions, the boundaries of their bodies” (1987: 427). The dagger stems the flood, at least in the imagination. In effect, the aggression men visit on women is really aimed at their own bodies (note Theweleit 1987: 427, 154-55). Woman must die in order to deaden the male body. Aggression toward Woman and self produces disciplina (or is it the other way around?). The pathos of Livy’s stories displaces the relief at the removal of the threatening element. “How tragic!” sigh author and reader, finding pleasure in the pain of noble loss. Ultimately, the pleasure of the narrative lies in killing what lives: women, the image of Woman as the object of desire, and male desire itself.
Discipline was necessary not only for the acquisition of empire but also for ruling it. The denial of the body to the self speaks the denial of social power to others; a Roman’s rule of his own body provides an image of Roman domination and a model of sovereignty-of Roman over non-Roman, of upper class over lower, of master over slave, of man over woman, and of Princeps over everyone else (note Livy’s use of a Greek metaphor likening a disordered body to the plebs’ revolt against the patres, 2.32.9-12). In particular, the morality of control served Rome’s new ruler. Augustus presented the required image of control and sacrifice

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(Res Gestae 4-6, 34; Suetonius Augustus 31.5, 33.1, 44-45, 51-58, 64.2-3, 65.3, 72-73, 76-77; cf. 71); denial and the morality of control enabled his authority to be “implanted into subjects’ bodies in the form of a lack in overflowing” (Theweleit 1987: 414). In the Princeps’ new order, there were to be no more selfish desires like those which had precipitated civil war. Woman was to be returned to her proper place. Marriage was to be regulated by the state; women’s sexuality was to form the images and establish the boundaries so necessary to secure Rome’s domination of others and Augustus’s structuring of power. Harnessed, chaste, and deadened, Woman became the matter of a new order designed to control men and the free movement of all bodies. “Women within the new state once again provide the building blocks for internal boundaries against life” (Theweleit 1987: 366).

Woman as Space: Not a Room of Her Own

Within imperial constructions and the political context of the late first century B.C., Livy’s account of early Rome creates Woman and her chastity as space, making her a catalyst for male action. She embodies the space of the home, a boundary, and a buffer zone. She is also a blank space-a void, for Livy effectively eliminates her voice, facilitating the perpetuation of male stories about men.

As is well known, a woman’s chastity is associated with the honor of her male kin (Dixon 1982; Ortner 1978). Lucretia’s behavior makes her husband the victor (victor maritus) in a contest between men (1.57). The praise awarded her is for chastity, measured by conduct outside the bedroom. Lucretia, spinning and alone but for her maids, acts out the traditional virtues of the good wife; the princes’ wives, banqueting with friends, presumably display Woman’s traditional vice, drinking wine, an offense tantamount to adultery (A. Watson 1975: 36-38; Maccormack 1975: 170-74). Verginia’s fiance Icilius (3.45.6-11) equates _an assault on female chastity with violence done to male bodies and accuses Appius Claudius of making the eradication of tribunes (whose bodies were sacrosanct) and the right of appeal, defenses of men’s libertas, an opportunity for regnum vestrae libidini (“a tyranny of your lust”).

The association of male honor and female chastity makes a different kind of sense when we observe the narrative role of other women in Livy’s early books. Women function as obstacles or embody spaces, often between and separating men. The Sabines put their bodies between their battling fathers and new husbands, offering to take on the anger the men feel toward one another and the violence they would inflict (1.13 .1-4 ). Tarpeia fails to use her body in this way. Bribed by the Sabine king when she fetches water outside the city wall, the girl admits Rome’s enemies into the citadel (1.11.6-9). The women whose actions preserve the physical integrity of both husbands and fathers are treasured by both; the girl whose treachery leaves her male kin vulnerable is crushed by the very enemy she aided.

As Natalie Kampen has pointed out, Tarpeia crosses the boundary of the city and appropriate behavior; the Sabines make themselves a boundary between warring men and observe appropriate behavior (1986: 10). If the issue is the control of female sexuality– control means the denlovment of the female bodv in relations

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between men. Proper deployment founds relations between men, making society possible in Levi-Strauss’s terms (1969; cf. Mitchell 1975: 370-76). Not surprisingly, friezes depicting these tales “appeared at the very heart of the nation in the Forum,” thus violating a convention that made women “extremely rare in public state-funded Roman sculpture” (1, 3). Kampen dates the friezes to 14-12 B.C., arguing that these representations served Augustus’s moral and social program (5 ff.). In effect, the friezes made visible the narrative role of women in Livy’s story of origin: within an emergent imperial order, women are fixed within the frame as boundary and space.

The move from animate life to inanimate matter is repeated in etymology. In each case, the Romans used a story of Woman’s body to explain the name of a fixture of Rome: from Tarpeia the name of a place, the Tarpeian rock associated with the punishment of traitors, and from the Sabines the names of political divisions of citizens (the curiae). Whether the story follows the naming or vice versa, women’s bodies literally become building material-the stuff of physical and political topography. Women who are supposed to have lived are transformed into places and spaces.

The Sabines, matronae (respectable married women) who voluntarily take up proper control of their own bodies, are reflected in Lucretia, the noble wife who will herself act and speak the proper use of her body. Tarpeia, virgo (unmarried girl) in need of paternal control, finds her counterpart in Verginia, whose father administers the necessary disposal of his daughter’s body. Livy’s matrona and virgo become spaces within the husband’s or father’s home. Unlike Dionysius of Halicamassus (4.66.1), Livy never moves Lucretia out of Collatinus’s house. She appears fixed in every scene-spinning in her hall, sleeping and pinned to the bed by Tarquin, and sitting in her bedroom when her kin come to her after the rape. This fixity in space informs her identity in the narrative and constitutes the grounds for male praise ( 1. 57. 9). And Verginius (3. 50. 9) literally equates his daughter with a place within his home (locum in domo sua).

In both narratives, the space that is Woman is equated with a chastity that should render the space of the home or between men impenetrable. Thus, rape or attempted rape appears as the penetration of space. The chastity of both women is described as a state of obstinacy or immobility (1.58.3-4, 5; 3.44.4). However, alone or accompanied only by women, wife and daughter are vulnerable to non-kin males who can use force combined with the threat of shame or the power of the state in order to satisfy their lust. Lucretia is a place where Tarquin intends to stick his sword or his penis. She appears as an obstacle to his desire, impenetrable even at the threat of death. When she gives way at the threat of a shame worse than rape, Tarquin conquers (vicisset, expugnato) not a person but her chastity (pudicitiam, decore). The rape of a Lucretia fixed in and identified with Collatinus’s home seems equivalent to a penetration of his private sphere, his territory.

Male heroes, not raped women, carry forward the main trajectory of Livy’s work-the history of the Roman state (see de Lauretis 1984: 109-24 on Oedipal narratives). They lead citizen males to overthrow a tyrannical ruler, advancing from the sphere of the home to that of the state, from private vengeance to public action. The transition from domestic to political is represented in a shift in the scene of

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action from Collatia and the private space of Collatinus’s home to Rome and the public space of the Forum. Brutus, not Lucretia (1.59.5; cf. Dionysius 4.66.1), effects the change of scene, just as he transposes her request for the punishment of the rapist to his own demand for the overthrow of the monarchy. His oath of vengeance begins with the determination to avenge Lucretia and finishes not with an oath to dethrone Tarquin’s family but with the promise to end the institution of monarchy itself.

The connection between the rape of an individual woman and the overthrow of monarchy and decemvirate finds its model in the Greek stereotype of the tyrant whose part Tarquin and Appius Claudius play (Ogilvie 1965: 195-97, 218-19, 453, 477; Dunkle 1971: 16): they are violent and rape other men’s women.6 Livy’s rewriting of the Greek paradigm, however, has a particularly Roman subtext: imperial conquest and its product, large-scale slavery. In both tales, men complain that they, Roman soldiers, are treated as Rome’s enemies (1.59.4), the conquered (3.47.2, 3.57.3, 3.61.4), or slaves (1.57.2, 59.4, 59.9, 3.45.8). In effect, king and decemvir behave as if citizen males, like slaves, lacked physical integrity. Very importantly, the “slave” makes possible the victimization of both women. Lucretia gives in when Tarquin threatens to kill her in a simulation of adultery with a slave. Appius Claudius intends to rape Verginia by having her adjudicated a slave, thus legally vulnerable to a master’s sexual use (cf. Dionysius 11.29-33, making clear the issue of the slave’s lack of physical integrity). Tarquin, his father, and Appius Claudius are made to do to Lucretia, Verginia, and their male kin what Roman “soldier males” do to the conquered.

Roman wives and children are assimilated to the conquered and slaves (3. 57 .4, 61.4 ), and the physical vulnerability of the latter is unquestioned. This was the empire that needed disciplina.
Verginia’s story sets out a logic of bodies: between the rape of a woman and direct violence to the bodies of her male kin lies male action. “Vent your rage on our backs and necks: let chastity at least be safe,” Icilius exclaims to Appius Claudius early in Livy’s account (3.45.9). Verginia’s betrothed offers to substitute male for female bodies. Appius’s lust, inflicted on wives and children, should be channeled into violence, inflicted on husbands and fathers. The switch never occurs, because male action intervenes and removes the source of lust and violence. At the end, Icilius, Verginius, and Numitorius are alive, well, and sacrosanct tribunes; chastity is safe; Verginia is dead.

But Verginia’s father makes clear that her rape poses a direct threat to the male body. After slaying her, he states that there is no longer a locus in his home for Appius’s lust, and he now intends to defend his own body as he had defended his daughter’s (3.50.9). The buffer between himself and Appius is gone.7 Woman’s chastity signifies her, and hence his, imperviousness to assault; her rape endangers his body. Thus, the raped woman becomes a casus belli, a catalyst for a male response which stems the threatened violence. Men halt the invasion before it gets to them.

Icilius’s speech suggests the nature of the threat to the male body (see Douglas 1984: 133 ff. and Donaldson 1982: 23-25, on the fear of pollution). His words effect a displacement. 8 As “rage” (saevire) replaces rape, male necks and backs

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proffered exchange excludes an assault on the body’s most vulnerable place-its orifices (Douglas 1984: 121). The very substitution of necks and backs for orifices masks an apprehension about male vulnerability: invasion of woman as boundary threatens penetration of the male body (see Richlin 1983: 57-63, 98-99).

In Livy’s accounts, men experience the offense of rape as tragedy. They grieve and are moved, but they do not directly suffer invasion; they remain intact. Moreover, they can feel like men, because they have taken out their own swords. In a most satisfy ing way, the invader loses ultimate control of the woman’s body. While Appius Claudius and Tarquin wield their penises or try to, the father and, even better, the woman herself wield the knife.

Male action against the tyrant (it should be emphasized) begins not with rape but with the woman’s death. Narratively, it appears as if Lucretia and Verginia must die in order for male action to begin and for the story to move on. Three logics seem to account for the slaying of the women and explain why the violence done to woman does not end with rape.

In the first place, a living Lucretia or Verginia would stand as evidence of disorder and chaos (see above on Horace Odes 3.6). Livy’s Verginius and Icilius speak of the social disorder Appius Claudius’s desire introduces for the men of their order and the destruction of the social ties between them. Verginius accuses Appius of instituting an order of nature-rushing into intercourse without distinction in the manner of animals (3 .47. 7). By killing his daughter, he halts the plunge into animality. Of course, animality and the disorder it signals mean that father and husband no longer control the bodies of “their” women. Appius robs Verginius of the ability to give his daughter in marriage to a man of his choosing (3 .4 7. 7). Icilius loses a bride intacta, and the bond between Icilius and Verginius would be flawed if Verginius offered him “damaged goods.” Icilius asserts that he is going to marry Verginia, and he intends to have a chaste bride (3 .45. 6-11 ). He will not allow his bride to spend a single night outside her father’s home (3 .45. 7).
Appius denies plebeian males membership in a patriarchal order. And where the decemvir offends an already existing patriarchal order, only the political change motivated by his assault on the chastity of a plebeian woman assures paternal power to the men of her social class. In versions of the story earlier than Livy’s first-century sources, Verginia was a patrician. By changing her status, Livy’s sources invested meanings from current political struggles into the fifth century Conflict of the Orders (Ogilvie 1965: 477). Yet the updated political story is essentially a story about patriarchy, for the political events tum on the control of a daughter’s/bride’s body.

Second, alive, the raped woman would constitute another sort of threat: once invaded, the buffer zone becomes harmful to what it/she once protected. If women are boundaries, rape, which assaults an orifice, a marginal area of the body, creates a special vulnerability for the “center,” that is, men. The danger of a living Verginia is noted above. Her life is dearer than her father’s own, but only if she is chaste and “free” (3.50.6), a body intact whose access lies in her father’s control. A raped Lucretia, still alive, would display the violation of her husband’s home. The mark of another man in Collatinus’s bed apparently cannot be erased, at least not without

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his wife’s death. Livy’s Lucretia speaks as if she and the marked bed are one: although her mind is guiltless, her body is violated and soiled. Only death, selfinflicted, can display her innocence ( 1. 58. 7). Soiled, the body must go ( see Douglas 1984: 113, 136, on inadvertent pollution and efforts made to align inward heart and public act).

For history to be a source of models for emulation (praef. 10), it must demonstrate an unequivocal pattern. The relation of a moral present to its imagined origins constructs chastity as an absolute quality (see Dixon 1982: 4). The pleas of Lucretia’s husband and father that the mind, not the body, sins frame her suicide as a tragic martyrdom. Correcting them, Lucretia makes ·herself an exemplum: “no unchaste woman will live with Lucretia as a precedent” (1.58.10). On the surface, the pleas of father and husband imply that men do not require Lucretia’s death: suicide appears as woman’s choice. This constructiop of female choice and agency disguises the male necessity at work in Lucretia’s eradication. Alive, even Lucretia would confront a patriarchal order with a model, an excuse, for the woman unchaste by volition. Lucretia’s statement admits no distinction: her suicide leaves no anomaly for the patriarchal future.

Third, and perhaps most important for the narrative: dead, the female body has other purposes. Dead, the woman whose chastity had been assaulted assumes other values. Dead, her body can be deployed, and the sight of it enjoyed, by all men. Without the stabbing of Lucretia and Verginia, there is no bloodied knife, no blood to swear on, no corpse to display to the masses. Brutus, Icilius, and Numitorius use the dead female body to incite themselves and other men (1. 59. 3, 3 .48. 7). The woman’s blood enlivens men’s determination to overthrow the tyrant. Her raped or almost raped and stabbed body kindles thoughts of men’s own sufferings and feeds mass male action (note Theweleit 1987: 34, 105-6); in an almost vampiric relation, the living are enlivened by the dead. He becomes free (i.e., comes alive) when she becomes an inert, unliving object.

Actually, Livy’s narrative deadens both wonien before the knife ever pierces them (Theweleit 1987: 90 ff.). Lucretia is introduced as an object in a male contest, as Verginia is an object of contention, pulled this way and that by the men who would claim her body. In the rape scene, Lucretia is inert; appropriately, she sees death from the moment Tarquin enters her bedroom. The stories “record the living as that which is condemned to death” (Theweleit 1987: 217). Narratively, Lucretia and Verginia become ever more dead, as action moves progressively further from them: from the sight of their deaths to the bloodstained knife to the raped, almost raped dead body to the story of that body told to men not present at the murder. The farther removed from the body, the wider the audience, the more public the action, and ultimately the larger the arena of Roman conquest and rule. Male action secures the form of the Roman state and libertas. Most immediately, this results in “soldier males” winning wars that, until these episodes, were stalemated.

The tragic effects and pathos evoked by the woman’s death veil the necessary central operation of the narrative: to create a purely public (and male) arena. Although presented as tragedies, Lucretia’s suicide and Verginia’s slaying remove the women from the scene, from between men. With the buffering space gone, there

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will now ensue a “real” struggle between men, a struggle that moves forward the central narrative, that of state and empire (on the primacy of public and male concerns, see 3.48.8-9 and Theweleit 1987: 88).

While consulship, tribunate, Senate, and assemblies mark the shape of the state whose development Livy traces, each rape, each body willing to bear the wounds men would inflict on each other, and each dead body sets in place a block of a patriarchal and imperial order. The rape of Rhea Silvia gives the Roman state its pater (no room here for a queen mother). The rape of the Sabine women makes possible patriarchy by supplying it with its one necessary component: the women who produce children. Lucretia and Verginia precipitate the overthrow of a tyrant and the confirmation, or indeed establishment, of patriarchy for patricians and then plebeians. Assured at home that their wives and children will not be treated as the conquered, these men can go forth, conquer an empire, and do to other men and women what they would not have done to their own wives and children.

It is in this context that we should see the silence in Livy’s narrative, the silence of Lucretia and Verginia, and the dead matter these women become. Verginia never speaks or acts. Livy remarks on her obstinacy in the face of Appius’s attempted seduction, although, in fact, he speaks not of her but of her pudor (3.44.4). When Appius’s client grabs her, her fear silences her; her nurse, not Verginia, cries out for help. The girl is led here and there by kin or grabbed by Appius’s client. There is no notice of tears, clinging, or interaction with her father, as in Dionysius’s telling (11.31.3, 32.1, 35, 37.4-5). Even the women who surround her are moving by the silence of their tears (3 .4 7.4 ). At the moment she would become a slave, Appius shouts, the crowd parts, the girl stands alone praeda iniuriae (“prey to sexual assault,” 3.48.3). A moment of silence. Her father takes Verginia’s life; he acts and speaks the meaning of her death. Nothing of or from Verginia. “From the start, indeed, she [a Freikorps bride] is no more than a fiction. She never appears in her own right; she is only spoken about” (Theweleit 1987: 32).

Throughout the events leading up to and including the rape, Livy’s Lucretia is also silent. Although the rape scene is highly dramatic, Livy gives us only Tarquin’s actions: he waits until the household is asleep, he draws his sword, he enters Lucretia’s bedroom, he holds her down, he speaks, pleads, and threatens. Lucretia is mute. Like Verginia’s, her terror eliminates speech, and her chastity makes her obdurate: she is a silent stone.

Silence is what Tarquin demands of her: “Tace, Lucretia, Sex. Tarquinius sum” ( “Be quiet, Lucretia, I am Sextus Tarquinius”). His speech could not connect silence and erasure more directly. The command and direct address (Tace, Lucretia) imply “I give the orders,” and since he orders Lucretia’s silence, the command is almost tautological. Then he asserts his own name (Sex. Tarquinius) and existence (sum). The insistence on his own existence follows froin his demand for her silence. Indicative, statement of fact, replaces imperative, command-here an order that she erase the fact of herself as a speaking subject; his name replaces hers. In effect, he says, “I am; you are not, although since I must order your silence, you are and I shall have to make you not be.” Implicitly, his existence as a speaking (here, an ordering) subject with a name depends on her status as an object without speech (see

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Kappeler 1986: 49). Like Brutus’s later deployment of her body in the overthrow of the monarchy, Tarquin’s words and act are vampiric: her silence (erasure), his existence.

Her silence constructs a pleasure of terror like that of the horror film, where the audience is held in expectation that what it fears will occur. Certainly, tension and terror cannot exist without Lucretia’s silence, without her presence as an actionless body. The description of Tarquin’s actions delays what every Roman would know to be the inevitable. Livy’s account allows the reader to dwell on the details of power asserted-drawn sword, hand on breast, woman pinned to the bed, woman starting out of sleep to hear “Tace, Lucretia, Sex. Tarquinius’sum.” The mute, immobile victim sets the escalating movement of violation in high relief. As in the cinema, the construction of powerlessness provides a perverse thrill.

What are the pleasures of this silence for male author and reader? Did Livy, “pen” in hand, identify with Tarquin and his drawn sword, experience the imagined exertion of force, and take pleasure in the prospect of penetration with sword or penis (on pen and penis, see Gilbert and Gubar 1979: 3-16)? Is this the titillation found by the male reader? Or does Lucretia’s silence also open a space for the flow of the reader’s feelings, permitting his entry into the forbidden pleasure of the penetrated, imagined from the place of one required to be a penetrator (Silverman 1980, and Richlin in Chapter 8 of this volume)?

About the act of penetration itself, no words and a gap filled with the language of chastity conquered. Despite rules of taste or convention, such language erases the moment of Lucretia’s violation and silences her experience as a subject of violation. Livy comments only, and only after her violation, that she was maesta ( “mournful”). The place of Lucretia’s pain is absent. Without words about her experience at that moment and without that moment, Lucretia is dead matter-not feeling, not thinking, not perceiving. Present is Lucretia’s chastity, but not Lucretia. Livy or convention-it doesn’t matter which-creates rape as a male event, and an imperial one. Rape consists of male action and female “space, the exertion of force and chastity.

After, and only after, the rape, Lucretia speaks and acts as Verginia does not. Donaldson sees Lucretia’s act as a sacrifice of self, contrasting it with Brutus’s sacrifice of his feelings and his sons (1982: 12). Brutus achieves political liberty, Lucretia personal liberty (8). Higonnet focuses on Lucretia’s speech as an explanatory text for suicide (1986: 69). She argues that Lucretia’s use of language is “revolutionary” because she sets her own verbal constructs against those of Collatinus which make her a verbal boast and a sexual object (75). With Donaldson (1982: 103 ff.), she views the stress on Brutus’s role as the “masculine domestication of an essentially revolutionary heroic instance of female suicide.”

This assumes that we can return to some origin where women occupied some other role and misses the male production of origin. The sacrifices of Brutus and Lucretia are “radically different,” but not for the reasons noted by Donaldson (12). Brutus’s words and actions bring a political order in which men like himself can act; his sacrifice preserves that order. Lucretia’s actions result in her own eradication. She is sacrificed so the men of her class may win their liberty-their

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ability to act. Her language kills no less than her actions: like the Sabines, she “asks for it.” Together, words and actions set an example for the control of female sexual activity; in other words, she founds an order in which her female descendants can only enact their own destruction. As with Rhea Silvia, the Sabines, Tarpeia, Horatia, and Verginia, men’s liberation and political advances require the sacrifice of Woman.

Moreover, both Lucretia’s words and her act silence any difference that would disturb the structural boundaries of an ideal patriarchal order. I find it difficult to see Lucretia’s speech (given her by the male historian, it should be emphasized) as revolutionary, when she is made to speak as well as act the absolute, objective quality of chastity and herself as a space invaded. Soiled is soiled: “No unchaste woman will live with Lucretia as a precedent.” To see or hear anything else would make Lucretia anomalous-innocent yet penetrated-and alive. Patriarchy in Livy’s good old days apparently cannot tolerate a subject whose speech would evoke the disorder of anomaly; it depends on woman’s silence, or at most speech that enunciates the role men set out for her (note Theweleit 1987: 123; Gilbert and Gubar 1979: 14).

Theweleit’s analysis of the “mode of production of [his] writers’ language” is instructive. Freikorps authors employ the postures of description, narration, representation, and argument “only as empty shells” (1987: 215). Rather, their linguistic process is one of transmutation. The events depicted serve a preconceived idea which is not directly described. The “ideational representation” impresses itself on perceived reality and devours it (87). While every linguistic process “appropriates and transforms reality” (215), Freikorps authors deaden what they depict. Theirs is a “language of occupation: it acts imperialistically against any form of independently moving life” (215). The life that especially draws the onslaught is the “living movement of women” and the whole complex of feelings and experiences, sexual and emotional, associated with women.
The thrust of Livy’s narrative kills, but with certain effects. Women are made dead, and men come alive. Women as a presence disappear from the narrative and leave the stage of history to men struggling with one another, winning wars, and building an empire which, of course, means making other women and men physically dead in conquest or socially dead in enslavement. Lucretia and Verginia endure and are removed from the scene by the activities of the conqueror-rape, death, enslavement. In effect, Livy builds Rome’s origin and its history with what deadens in the imperial present.

Where it would seem that women in Livy are made dead with the result that the men who make empire come alive, this operation of the narrative veils the deadness of the men who build imperial society. Disciplina requires bodies insensible to desire. Brutus holds aloft the bloody knife drawn from Lucretia’s body and swears the overthrow of tyranny. He evokes the more recent image of his descendant, beloved by Caesar and one of his assassins. Livy seems simply to have replaced one dead body with another; Lucretia’s corpse hides another, not of the past but of Augustus’s emerging imperial order-Gaius Julius Caesar, a man who controlled neither his ambition nor his bodily desires.

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Epilogue: The News, History, and the Body of Woman

The story of Lucretia, Donaldson says, has disappeared from popular knowledge not on account of “moral disapproval, but neglect: the explanation lies in the modem decline in classical knowledge and classical education” (1982: 168). We are too distant from ancient Rome and the eighteenth century that found meaning in its virtues. Instead, “we celebrate the ‘heroes’ of the sports field and the world of entertainment more readily than the heroes of the battlefield and the deathbed; the word is drained of its moral sense.”

I cannot share Donaldson’s perception of distance and difference. The news, that raw material of political history, seems to belong to the “world of entertainment”: fiction and fact meld, working on and with the same iJTiages. Through them echo the women and gender relations in Livy’s stories of early Rome, his narrative of origins constructed in apprehension of decadence and decline. The Iran-Contra hearings slip into the air time of the soap opera. The cases of Bernhard Goetz and Baby M become news and made-for-TV movies. In the newspaper, extramarital sex costs a politician his chance at the presidency; in the cinema, it nearly costs a man his family and his life. In Rambo films and Fatal Attraction, “the world of entertainment” does offer us heroes of the battlefield and the deathbed (more precisely, death and bed). Daily, images of woman as space and void cross my TV screen. Often, the news seems written on the bodies of women; at least, she is there-a part of the landscape of what becomes history.

This is not a Roman landscape. The women belong to seemingly different narratives: hostages, not raped women, catalyzed action in Reagan’s White House. Women are not slain in current political narratives, yet seemingly different stories proffer words flooded with “moral sense,” implicitly urging correct bodily behavior, generally the practices of self-control- “just say no.” These stories, too, require the bodies of women, made dead by their silence and their allocation to a holding place in stories of men. And when these”women speak, they enunciate this place or their pleasure as inanimate matter, like a Barbie doll available for purchase.

The “decline in classical knowledge” has not spelled the disappearance of these features of Roman fictions, however unfamiliar the specific narratives. The deadening or silencing of Woman perpetuates the fictions and history of the bodies politic, female, and male. Since the eighteenth century, when some celebrated Lucretia’s story, the commodity has taken the place of honor in systems of value as a bourgeois order replaced an aristocratic one, but the images of Woman have followed the displacement. “Her image sells his products” (Pfohl 1990: 223-24); it “sells” Livy’s history, too.

NOTES

This essay has grown out of extended discussions with Amy Richlin, Avery Gordon, and Andrew Herman, and I have benefited from their insight, critical comments, and constructive suggestions. To each, a special thank you.

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1.Translations from ancient sources are the author’s own, unless indicated otherwise. LCL refers to the Loeb Classical Library.

2.Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, married to Aeneas in order to cement an alliance between Latins and Trojans, disappears from the text (1.3.3), as do the politically and/or sexually active Tanaquil and Tullia (exiled 1.59.13). On this and related issues, see now Jed 1989 and Joplin 1990, which unfortunately appeared too late to be considered here.

3.By “submits” (or, later, “gives in”), I do not intend to imply consent on Lucretia’s part (contra Donaldson 1982: 24 and Bryson 1986: 165-66). To speak of consent in conditions of force and violence is meaningless; in Lucretia’s situation, it seems perverse. She can die or live through the rape only to defend her honor by suicide.

4.I distinguish an individual woman or women from Woman, “a fictional construct, a distillate from diverse but congruent discourses dominant in Western cultures” (de Lauretis 1984: 5).

5.Appetites include a decadent concern with food, table servants, and dining accoutrements. For discussion and sources on Roman luxury and decadence, see Earl 1961: 41ff; 1967: 17-20; and J. Griffin 1976. Uncontrolled sexuality and decadent eating fit LeviStrauss’s observation of a “very profound analogy which people throughout the world seem to find between copulation and eating” (1966: 105). See Modleski’s analysis of the “ambivalence towards femininity” played out in a woman’s function “as both edible commodity and inedible pollutant” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1988: 101-14).

6.It is well known that Livy drew on other paradigms and stereotypes, literary genres, and Hellenistic historical practices; however, for my purposes, tracing the elements from diverse sources is less important than how they work within Livy’s historical discourse. As Phillipides (1983: 119 n. 20) points out, “the elements taken from a prior sign system acquire a different significance when transposed into the new sign system.” Following Julia Kristeva, she notes that “this process of transformation involves the destruction of the old and the formation of a new signification.”

7.Ironically, the removal of Woman in both stories returns Roman “soldier males” to the conditions of their mythical patres Romulus and Remus, two men with􀀟ut a woman, not even a mother, between them (1. 6 .4-7. 3 ). Quite literally, the twins try to occupy the same space at the same time and do violence to each other. Like the Romans and the Sabines, they cannot coexist without the body of woman between them, without the space and place of “not us.”

8.Tales of male bodies that suffer violence and penetration focus on those who occupy the place of the son in potestate-sons killed by stern fathers and young men raped ( often unsuccessfully) by evil army officers and magistrates (Valerius Maximus 5.8.1-5, 6.1.5, 7, 9-12); see Richlin 1983: 220-26, esp. 225-26. In effect, Roman patriarchy associates all women with sons in paternal power. Apprehension about their vulnerability to aggressive non-kin males would seem to stem from the “rightful” power that fathers (and husbands) wielded over their bodies.

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Joanna Kenty. 2017. “Avenging Lucretia”

“Once Woman has played her role — to attract the villain whose actions set in motion other active males who construct the state, empire, and therefore history in the Roman sense — she must go. …‘How tragic!’ sigh author and reader, finding pleasure in the pain of noble loss.”
— Sandra Joshel, The Body Female and the Body Politic

Last semester, as usual, I taught seminar students about the rise and fall of Appius Claudius the decemvir. I explained, “Tyrants think they can have it all, they take and they take and they take, until one day they go too far. For the Romans, thinking you could just grab any girl you wanted because you had so much power was unacceptable, and so that was the end of Appius’ rise to power.”

“What a nice idea.”

I cut myself off there, but some groans from (female) students suggested that they had the Access Hollywood tape on their minds, too.

For Livy in particular, a Roman historian of the 1st century BCE, sexual violence is a catalyst for regime change — not once, but twice in Rome’s early history. The tyrannical seventh (and last) king of early Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, has an equally despicable son, Sextus. Tarquinius murders his political opponents in secret or openly, forces the Romans to become construction workers in his quest to monumentalize the city, and generally rules through fear and violence. Sextus supports his father’s regime by massacring the entire upper class of a neighboring town, Gabii. But that’s not what gets them overthrown.

No, their downfall comes when Sextus catches sight of Lucretia, a beautiful matron of impeccable virtue and chastity, and decides he has to have her. He breaks into her room and rapes her. After he leaves, Lucretia calls in her husband, Tarquinius Collatinus, who happens to be the king’s cousin, and Lucius Junius Brutus, the king’s son-in-law, and she tells them what has happened, demanding that they avenge her honor. They agree to avenge her and reassure her that she has done nothing to deserve this, but to make sure no one thinks she went along with the rape willingly — to prevent other women from citing her name to exonerate themselves, in fact — Lucretia kills herself on the spot.

Holding the bloody dagger drawn from Lucretia’s breast, Brutus addresses the Roman people and convinces them to banish the king (who was at that time away from the city) and to abolish the monarchy altogether. They revolt against the very notion of an institution which makes someone feel entitled to rape a Roman matron.

A few decades later, history repeats itself. Rome’s newly-formed republic is in crisis again because the common people feel that the consuls’ power has become oppressive. Seeking equity and justice under the rule of law, they elect ten men to write a constitution for Rome, and so the decemvirate is born.

As it turns out, giving legislative, judicial, and executive power all to a single governing body is an experiment doomed to failure. One of the decemviri, Appius Claudius, schemes to stay in office for an extra year and to have all his colleagues replaced with his own yes-men. The elites are pushed out of power, the laws are abandoned, justice is lost, and the common people are even more victimized than before. There is no solution in sight until Appius Claudius spots a girl, Verginia, and decides he’s got to have her. Sound familiar?

Appius has one of his cronies try to claim that she’s a fugitive slave who belongs to him, knowing that he will just side with the crony in court, and the girl will be all his (all slaves are up for grabs as sex slaves, after all). Rather than abandon his daughter to this fate, Verginia’s father Verginius kills her on the spot, and then leads a movement to depose this new tyrant and restore the republican system of government.

Livy is clear: this isn’t a phenomenon limited to one individual, one family, one moment in time, one form of government. This is the course tyranny often runs. Political power and sexual power end up intertwined in the most sinister of ways; when men want too much of one, they often seem to want too much of the other. That hasn’t changed much.

Donald Trump and Roger Ailes and Harvey Weinstein and Bill O’Reilly and Mark Halperin and Bill Clinton, like Sextus Tarquinius and Appius Claudius, quite literally get off on their power. So too, I suspect, do the many male professors who have apparently confused authority and mentorship with sexual domination. Part of this phenomenon seems to be the effect of the narcissism and inflated ego that result from power: who wouldn’t want intimacy with that power? And failing that, some seem to think, who would dare to say no, or to seek retribution?

Donald Trump hasn’t faced a real reckoning for the Access Hollywood tape, but surely the outrage the tape produced among women — rendered visible in pussy hats and mass marches across the country — helped to drive Harvey Weinstein’s victims to unite and take action against their own assailant. Now that women are leading the revolution for themselves, maybe history won’t keep repeating itself. The dominoes are falling. Ding dong, the ogre’s dead. Pass the popcorn.

But why now?  Or for that matter, why was it Lucretia’s death that spurred revolution?  Why was it Verginia’s death that made the decemvirate intolerable?  Which tyrannical straw breaks the camel’s back?  Rape is surely a heinous crime, but it is certainly not the first one in either of these stories.

No one liked Tarquinius. Tarquinius assassinated his beloved predecessor in public, in a meeting of the senate. He didn’t bother to hide his cruelty or his ambitions. Neither did Appius Claudius. When revolution against these two tyrants did come, it wasn’t really all that hard: close the gates and shut Tarquinius out, in the first case, or secede en masse in the second case, shutting down the government to force regime change.

So why didn’t the revolution come sooner? Especially the second time — did they really need to wait to see how the tyrant’s career would turn out? Couldn’t the Romans, so famously paranoid about the specter of monarchy, have acted sooner? Apparently our human tolerance for oppression is quite high.

Part of the timing of Tarquinius’ removal, of course, has to do with Lucretia’s own agency. She demands that her menfolk avenge her, and so she authors the revolution in some sense. Her power to do so depends largely on the fact that she is a victim no one could possibly blame: the perfect woman, a chaste matron, an ideal housewife — Livy makes sure to fix this image in our minds.

Activist movements flourish when they hit upon a figure as “ideal” as Lucretia through whom to make their case: Rosa Parks, Edie Windsor, Rosa María Hernández. Verginia, too, is just a pretty young maiden, the daughter of a soldier, betrothed to a virtuous young hero, perfect in every way. Meanwhile, a long line of non-ideal, non-conforming victims (including many trans women) are still waiting for their avengers. And it’s not just men who join the effort to vilify or silence victims, as Lena Dunham has recently reminded us.

It’s taken 70 women together to amass Lucretia’s persuasive power among them against Harvey Weinstein — I guess the reasoning goes that they can’t all be lying sluts, can’t all be treacherous sinners (like Sextus Tarquinius’ own wife, up late at a drunken revel while Lucretia’s at home weaving quietly). The men are the liars hiding behind non-disclosure agreements, yet it is the women who are disbelieved. Privilege is power, and privilege is credibility.

Even more perfect (for the purposes of their avengers), Lucretia and Verginia are dead, martyred for the cause, enshrining their blamelessness. They don’t attack their attackers, they don’t go on witch hunts, they don’t lead the movements they started. They aren’t angry, they don’t raise their voices, they aren’t scary. Their deaths — even Verginia’s death at a man’s hands — prove their innocence, or at least prevent anyone from arguing otherwise too forcefully: we shrink from blaming a dead victim.

Lucretia’s death signals that she sees no hope of success in advocating for herself and persuading others of her own innocence; she thinks her best hope is to traumatize the people — particularly the men — around her, to force them to take action on her behalf. As disturbingly tragic as that is, it does show powerful agency, and it gives Lucretia a voice, which is denied to many rape victims.

It would be much more comfortable to say that the Romans valued and respected women so much that rape, perpetrated or planned, was a crime they could not tolerate. It would be more comfortable for us to believe that of our own society also.

Men certainly are conditioned to protect women they believe to be helpless. But they choose their battles: they didn’t make their stand against a transgression by Tarquinius himself, and we didn’t take Trump down. They went after the king’s son first, not the king himself; we’re going after Hollywood, not Washington, and (as Donald Trump Jr. likes to remind everyone) after a liberal, Harvey Weinstein, who is thus apparently held to a higher standard. Al Franken called for an ethics investigation of himself, not least because he expects his supporters to demand justice; Roy Moore does not seem to expect the same.

Kevin Spacey’s demise was so quick, some have speculated, because it wasn’t a woman but a man — actually, at least 15 men — whom he assaulted, and we are conditioned to believe men in preference to women. Bill Cosby’s downfall may have been hastened because of his race, and again, because of a critical mass of accusers. Brutus and Verginius revolt against relatively low-hanging fruit, and so do we.

But the sound of the dominoes falling is still awfully satisfying, and, better yet, the elections earlier this month suggest that momentum is building for a revolution of sorts here too, one fueled and catalyzed by outrage over sexual domination that might finally drive us to do something about political domination, too.

Perhaps, as Livy suggests, a culture really can collectively snap, all at once.

Brutus and Verginius end up liberating their fellow citizens, but probably only as a side effect of their campaign to restore their own honor as men, which has been threatened by the violation of women under their protection. Now that women are taking up the bloody dagger for themselves, it remains to be seen what kind of liberation we can achieve.

No one in ancient Rome was going to let Lucretia turn that dagger on her assailant, or let Verginia speak out against tyranny, or let a woman run for consul even if she was the one who made the creation of that office possible. Let’s hope that, after 2,500 years, we’re finally getting somewhere.

Joanna Kenty is a lecturer in the Classics program and the Responsible Governance and Sustainable Citizenship Program at the University of New Hampshire.

https://eidolon.pub/avenging-lucretia-dd14e936840c

V

Queering Rome

First, we are reading a short excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  For another translation and the Latin, check out the Loeb.

Second, we’ll read Nicole Speth’s 2015 Undergraduate Thesis.  Nicole will stop by on Tuesday to talk with us about her research for this paper (and her current project).

Here’s her poster:

Thesis Poster

And a video to give you (very important) context for her title:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas112pomonavalentine/?p=400

Third, a 2019 piece from Eidolon by Grace Gilles.

Please continue to use hypothes.is to annotate!

18

Ovid: The Metamorphoses : Book IX: lines 666 - 797

The English: Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved

Bk IX:666-713 The birth of Iphis

Perhaps, the story of this new marvel would have filled Crete’s hundred cities, if Crete had not recently known a miracle nearer home, in the metamorphosis of Iphis. In the Phaestos region, near royal Cnossos, there once lived a man named Ligdus, undistinguished, a native of the place, his wealth no greater than his fame, but living a blameless and honourable life. When his pregnant wife, Telethusa, was near to her time, he spoke these words of warning in her ear: ‘There are two things I wish for: that you are delivered with the least pain, and that you produce a male child. A girl is a heavier burden, and misfortune denies them strength. So, though I hate this, if, by chance, you give birth to a female infant, reluctantly, I order – let my impiety be forgiven! – that it be put to death.’ He spoke, and tears flooded their cheeks, he who commanded, and she to whom the command was given. Nevertheless, Telethusa, urged her husband, with vain prayers, not to confine hope itself. Ligdus remained fixed in his determination.

Now, her pregnant belly could scarcely bear to carry her fully-grown burden, when Io, the daughter of Inachus, at midnight, in sleep’s imagining, stood, or seemed to stand, by her bed: Isis, accompanied by her holy procession. The moon’s crescent horns were on her forehead, and the shining gold of yellow ears of corn, and royal splendour belonged to her. With her were the jackal-headed Anubis, the hallowed cat-headed Bast, the dappled bull Apis, and Harpocrates, the god who holds his tongue, and urges silence, thumb in mouth. The sacred rattle, the sistrum, was there; and Osiris, for whom her search never ends; and the strange serpent she fashioned, swollen with sleep-inducing venom, that poisoned the sun-god Ra. Then, as if Telethusa had shaken off sleep, and was seeing clearly, the goddess spoke to her, saying: ‘O, you who belong to me, forget your heavy cares, and do not obey your husband. When Lucina has eased the birth, whatever sex the child has, do not hesitate to raise it. I am the goddess, who, when prevailed upon, brings help and strength: you will have no cause to complain, that the divinity, you worshipped, lacks gratitude.’ Having given her command, she left the room. Joyfully, the Cretan woman rose, and, lifting her innocent hands to the stars, she prayed, in all humility, that her dream might prove true.

When the pains grew, and her burden pushed its own way into the world, and a girl was born, the mother ordered it to be reared, deceitfully, as a boy, without the father realising. She had all that she needed, and no one but the nurse knew of the fraud. The father made good his vows, and gave it the name of the grandfather: he was Iphis. The mother was delighted with the name, since it was appropriate for either gender, and no one was cheated by it. From that moment, the deception, begun with a sacred lie, went undetected. The child was dressed as a boy, and its features would have been beautiful whether they were given to a girl or a boy.

Bk IX: 714-763 Iphis and Ianthe

Thirteen years passed by, meanwhile, and then, Iphis, your father betrothed you to golden-haired Ianthe, whose dowry was her beauty, the girl most praised amongst the women of Phaestos, the daughter of Telestes of Dicte. The two were equal in age, and equal in looks, and had received their first instruction, in the knowledge of life, from the same teachers. From this beginning, love had touched both their innocent hearts, and wounded them equally, but with unequal expectations. Ianthe anticipated her wedding day, and the promised marriage, believing he, whom she thought to be a man, would be her man. Iphis loved one whom she despaired of being able to have, and this itself increased her passion, a girl on fire for a girl.

Hardly restraining her tears, she said ‘What way out is there left, for me, possessed by the pain of a strange and monstrous love, that no one ever knew before? If the gods wanted to spare me they should have spared me, but if they wanted to destroy me, they might at least have visited on me a natural, and normal, misfortune. Mares do not burn with love for mares, or heifers for heifers: the ram inflames the ewe: its hind follows the stag. So, birds mate, and among all animals, not one female is attacked by lust for a female. I wish I were not one! Yet that Crete might not fail to bear every monstrosity, Pasiphaë, Sol’s daughter, loved a bull, though still that was a female and a male. My love, truth be told, is more extreme than that. She at least chased after the hope of fulfilment, though the bull had her because of her deceit, and in the likeness of a cow, and the one who was deceived was a male adulterer. Though all of the world’s cleverness were concentrated here, though Daedalus were to return on waxen wings, what use would it be? Surely even his cunning arts could not make a boy out of a girl? Surely even he could not transform you, Ianthe?

Rather be firm-minded, Iphis, and pull yourself together, and, with wisdom, shake off this foolish, useless passion. Look at what you have been, from birth, if you don’t want to cheat yourself, and seek out what is right for you, and love as a woman should! It is hope that creates love, and hope that nourishes it. Everything robs you of that. No guardian keeps you from her dear arms, no wary husband’s care, no cruel father, nor does she deny your wooing herself. Yet you can never have her, or be happy, whatever is accomplished, whatever men or gods attempt.

Even now, no part of my prayers has been denied. The gods have readily given whatever they were able, and my father, her father, and she herself, want what I want to happen. But Nature does not want it, the only one who harms me, more powerful than them all. See, the longed-for time has come, the wedding torch is at hand, and Ianthe will become mine – yet not be had by me. I will thirst in the midst of the waters. Juno, goddess of brides, and Hymen, why do you come to these marriage rites, where the bridegroom is absent, and both are brides?’

Bk IX: 764-797 Isis transforms Iphis

With these words, she stopped speaking. The other girl was no less on fire, and prayed, Hymen, that you would come quickly. Telethusa, afraid of what she sought, merely put off the day: now lengthening the delay through pretended illness, now, frequently, using omens and dreams as an excuse. But eventually every pretext was exhausted, the date for the delayed marriage ceremony was set, and only a day remained. Then Telethusa took the sacred ribbons from her own and her daughter Iphis’s head, so that their hair streamed down, and clinging to the altar, cried: ‘Isis, you who protect Paraetonium, Pharos, the Mareotic fields, and Nile, divided in its seven streams, I pray you, bring help, and relieve our fears! Goddess, I saw you once, you, and those symbols of you, and I knew them all, accompanied by the jingling bronze of the sistrum, and imprinted your commands on my remembering mind. That my daughter looks on the light, that I have not been punished, behold, it was your purpose, and your gift. Gladden us with your aid. Have pity on us both!’

Tears followed words. The goddess seemed to make the altar tremble (it did tremble), and the doors of the temple shook, her horns, shaped like the moon’s crescents, shone, and the sistrum rattled loudly. Not yet reassured, but gladdened by the auspicious omen, the mother left the temple. Iphis, her companion, followed, taking larger paces than before; with no whiteness left in her complexion; with additional strength, and sharper features, and shorter, less elegant hair; showing more vigour than women have. Take your gifts to the temple, Iphis: rejoice, with confidence, not fear! You, who were lately a girl, are now a boy!

They take their gifts to the temple, and add a votive tablet: the tablet has this brief line:

IPHIS PERFORMS AS A BOY, WHAT HE PROMISED, AS A GIRL.

The next day’s sun reveals the wide world in its rays, when Venus, and Juno, joined with Hymen, come, to the marriage torches, and Iphis, the boy, gains possession of his Ianthe.

19

Female Homoeroticism in the Roman Empire: How Many Licks Does It Take to Get to the Disruption of a Phallocentric Model of Sexuality? By Nicole Speth

Hofstra University
Hempstead, NY

2015

[Editor’s Note:  Page numbers appear at the top of each page, as in the original document.]

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Rogavit alter tribadas et molles mares
quae ratio procreasset, exposuit senex:
“Idem Prometheus, auctor vulgi fictilis
qui, simul offendit ad fortunam, frangitur,
naturae partes veste quas celat pudor
cum separatim toto finxisset die,
aptare mox ut posset corporibus suis,
ad cenam est invitatus subito a Libero;
ubi inrigatus multo venas nectare
sero domum est reversus titubanti pede.
tum semisomno corde et errore ebrio
adplicuit virginale generi masculo,
et masculina membra adposuit feminis.
ita nunc libido pravo fruitur gaudio.”
-Phaedrus, Fabulae Aesopiae 4.15

The other person asked, what reason had produced tribades and soft men. The old man explained: “The same Prometheus, originator of the common people from clay who are broken as soon as they encounter fortune. When for a whole day he had shaped separately the parts of nature, the ones which shame hides with clothing, so that he would soon be able to fasten them with their own bodies, he was suddenly invited to dinner by Liber. When he had been soaked in his veins with much nectar, he returned home at a late hour with a wavering foot. Then with a drowsy heart and with drunk error, he applied the maidenly [member] to the male type, and he applied the masculine members to women. And so now lust enjoys wicked delight.”1

The above passage, written sometime in the 1st century,2 contains one of the two earliest extant uses of the word tribas (plural tribades) and exemplifies not only the importance of gender roles in defining a person’s sexuality in antiquity, but also the high level of castigation that gender-deviants received. The Latin word tribas (τριβάς in Greek) comes from the Greek verb τρίβειν, meaning “to rub,” and is usually used to describe a hyper-masculine, penetrative woman who has sex with other women (though there are several textual instances in which a

1 All translations are my own (with guidance from Dr. Steven D. Smith), unless a specific translation is cited.
2 All centuries are CE unless otherwise noted.

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tribas penetrates men or boys). The nature of this penetration is rarely described in detail, though some authors imply or describe an artificial phallus, an extremely large clitoris, or a hermaphroditic or otherwise phallicized woman. Still, some authors refer to any woman with a sexual desire for other women as a tribas, the implications of which I will discuss in detail later. Though we do not know for certain whether the word was originally used by  the Greeks or the Romans, Diana Swancutt makes a strong argument in her article “Still Before Sexuality” that the Romans coined the term and concept, intentionally from a Greek word, as a way of demonizing the Greeks as androgynous gender monsters.3 Regardless of whether her theory is correct, it is clear from all extant sources that the term tribas is used nearly universally with derision and contempt.

Two other important terms seem to suggest female homoerotic^4 relationships: the Latin word frictrix and the Greek word ἑταιρίστρια (masculine ἑταιριστής). Frictrix occurs once in the 3rd century in a Christian text by Tertullian,5 and once in a 4th century astrological text by Hermes Trismegistus.6 Sandra Boehringer infers that it is synonymous with tribas from the latter’s use of it, though admitting that it is not possible to determine its meaning from Tertullian’s passages alone.7 The most famous example of the use of the term ἑταιρίστρια is in Aristophanes’ speech from Plato’s Symposium, when he is describing the splitting in half of the four-armed, four-legged humans in his theory on love and attraction. He explains that women

3 Diana M. Swancutt, “Still Before Sexuality: ‘Greek’ Androgyny, the Roman Imperial Politics of Masculinity and the Roman Invention of the Tribas,” in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, ed. T. C. Penner and C V. Stichele (Ledin: Brill, 2007), 11-62.

4 I will continuously use “homoerotic” rather than “homosexual” to avoid the modern implications associated with homosexuality. As the Greeks and Romans did not classify sexuality in the same ways we do, it is anachronistic to use terms such as “gay,” “lesbian,” or “homosexual” to describe ancient people or their relationships.
5 Tertullian, Resurrection 16.6.
6 Hermes Trismegistus, Liber Hermetis Trismegisti, 32.
7 Sandra Boehringer, “What is Named by the Name ‘Philaenis’: Gender, Function, and Authority of an
Antonomastic Figure,” in Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, ed. M. Masterson, N. S. Rabinowitz, and J. Robson (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 386.

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who were previously attached to other women “do not at all offer their mind to men, but very much have turned themselves to women, and the ἑταιρίστριαι are born from this kind” (“οὐ πάνυ αὗται τοῖς ἀνδράσι τὸν νοῦν προσέχουσιν, ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας τετραμμέναι εἰσί, καὶ αἱ ἑταιρίστριαι ἐκ τούτου τοῦ γένους γίγνονται”).8 If the term was a common one for women who engaged in same-sex relationships, it is lost to us now, for there are very few other uses of it. While Plato does not seem to imply an active or passive nature with the term, instead using it for any woman who is attracted to other women, Lucian later uses the word ἑταιρίστρια synonymously with tribas to depict a masculine, penetrative woman.9 In addition to these uses, Pollux uses the masculine version of the word (ἑταιριστής) in his 2nd century dictionary entitled Onomasticon. In this entry, he compares the word with words such as ἀσελγαίνων (a man being licentious) and μάχλος (a lewd man), though he does not mention anything specifically about same-sex desire.10

As shown in the above passage of Phaedrus, gender-roles were of key importance for the Greeks and Romans in defining sexuality, so much so that the fable offers a physical solution (the mixing up of male and female genitals) to the problem of why certain women were tribades (masculine, pursuing women) and certain men were molles (literally meaning “soft,” widely used to depict sexually passive men). It is unclear from the passage whether tribades are people with female bodies who have had penises mistakenly attached to them, or whether they are people with male bodies who have had vaginas attached to them.11 Either way, the poem is meant to

8 Plato, Symposium, 191e.
9 Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans 5.2.
10 Pollux, Onomasticon, 6.188.
11 For the first interpretation, see Judith P. Hallett, “Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. J. P. Hallett and M.S. Skinner (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 256. For the latter interpretation, see Daniel Boyarin, “Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality’?” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1995): 345, n. 29.

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depict the feminization of sexually passive men and the masculinization of sexually active women. The ancient Greeks and Romans do not define a person’s sexual orientation on the sole basis of gender. Instead, they are chiefly concerned with activity and passivity in sex: adult males are expected to take an active role, females a passive role, and anyone who deviates from this is subject, at the very least, to mockery.
Though there has been little study on the classification of female homoeroticism in the ancient world, many scholars have analyzed male same-sex relationships in Greece and Rome, and among the extensive discussions on how to define male sexuality in the classical world, Holt Parker’s “Teratogenic Grid” has given us a valuable classification system for Roman sexualities. Though I disagree with the way that Parker portrays female sexuality—since he seems to base what little discussion he has of female homoeroticism on standards that are set for men rather than women—his male classification stands up to scrutiny, and is helpful in explaining the ways in which the Romans thought about sexuality in general.12 Parker’s grid is based on the activity, passivity, and genders of the sex partners, as well as the orifice (vagina, anus, or mouth) that they are using. For example, his grid shows that a man who prefers to penetrate the anus of any gender—it does not matter what gender, as long as he is taking an active role—is called a pedicator or pedico. A man who prefers to be penetrated anally, however, is called a cinaedus or pathicus, and would be chastised for this preference.13

If we accept Parker’s grid, then we see that the classification of Roman sexuality is entirely phallocentric and thus leaves out any kind of sex that does not involve a penis. This

12 For a discussion on Roman classification of sex, see also Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 177-245.
13 Holt N. Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. J. P. Hallett and M.S. Skinner (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 47-65.

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presents a problem for the Romans when trying to discuss any kind of sexual relation that does not involve a penis, and is especially apparent in their discussions of cunnilingus and female homoeroticism. Though neither of these practices fit the Roman phallocentric model, they are still recognized and discussed—though often satirically and with great mockery. The term for a man who performs oral sex on a woman is cunnilinctor,14 and this kind of man is highly stigmatized. In the Roman mindset, to perform oral sex on anyone is to make oneself passive, to choose to be orally fucked by that person. According to their phallocentric model, then, the Romans conceptualize the cunnilinctor as a man being orally penetrated by a woman.15

There is more contention over how the Romans classify female homoeroticism. Parker maintains that female homoeroticism is also seen as phallocentric, and that “tribades practice a type of fake intercourse” in that they either use an artificial phallus or else “rub their vulvas together.”16 He does not explain how the latter activity, which is both reciprocal and lacking a phallus, is phallocentric. Indeed, many scholars agree that the Romans intentionally masculinize the tribas and give her some means of penetration in order to better fit their phallocentric model.17 Furthermore, many claim that this masculinizing (and often phallicizing) of the tribas serves to stigmatize active women.18 While I do not entirely disagree with either of these assessments, I argue that they are not completely inclusive of all Roman texts, but rather they take their findings mostly from satirical sources that exaggerate the characteristics of the tribas

14 Ibid., 51.
15 It is interesting to note, however, that while the men in these relationships are clearly viewed as being passive (making their female partners active), the women are not chastised in these cases for being masculine, as they are when they penetrate their partners with a phallus.
16 Ibid., 59.
17 Holt N. Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” 58-59; Pamela Gordon, “Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. J. P. Hallett and M.S. Skinner (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 275; and Diana M. Swancutt, “Still Before Sexuality,” 11-61.
18 Hallett, “Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature,” 255-273; and Diana M. Swancutt, “Still Before Sexuality,” 11-61.

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for comic effect. I also argue that the Romans themselves did not consider female homoeroticism and male homoeroticism to be related. This argument has been made by quite a few scholars, and along these lines, Boehringer succinctly states: “In the ancient world, there was no perceived equivalence of the love between men and the love between women. Similarly, when we study prescriptive or moralizing discourse, the image of the tribas is not the counterpart of the figure of the kinaidos or the euruproktos.”19

If we approach female homoeroticism in the same ways in which we do male homoeroticism—and more broadly, Roman concepts of sexuality—we are left with two conclusions that I think to be troublesome. The first is that there must be an active partner and a passive partner, and that the active partner must have the means of penetrating her lover.20 The second is that only the woman who is defying her gender role by being an active partner should be chastised, and that the passive woman, who is fulfilling her role of being penetrated, should be accepted. It is easy to see why the first point provokes scrutiny, given that it is physically possible for women to have sex with each other without any penetration, and that reciprocity in homosexual sex between women is equally possible. That being said, it is likely that many of the Roman men writing about these relationships were unaware of these possibilities, and it is even conceivable (though I think very unlikely) that the women, too, were so engrained with a phallocentric concept of sexuality that they themselves heeded the phallocentric model. Given extant textual and artistic evidence, however, I argue that homoerotic relationships between women did not always follow a phallocentric model. I also argue that female homoeroticism was

19 The latter are both terms for a passive male lover in a homoerotic relationship; Sandra Boehringer, “Female Homoeroticism,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, ed. Thomas K. Hubbard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2014), 160-1.
20 There is a possible exception to this in the practice of cunnilingus, though I will discuss later why cunnilingus (either heterosexual or homosexual) is generally troubling to the Roman classification of sexuality.

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heavily criticized in Roman antiquity, and that though active, masculine female partners were surely criticized more heavily, even the passive partners were stigmatized for their same-sex relations. Through these arguments, I will show that female homoeroticism does not fit the widely-accepted model that we currently hold for homoerotic relationships in Roman antiquity and that the study of sexuality in the Greco-Roman world should therefore consider female homoerotism differently than its male counterpart.

Masculinized Women in Homoerotic Relationships

Most commonly in the Roman Empire, women who sexually pursue other women are depicted as being masculinized and often phallicized. If Hallett’s interpretation is correct, Phaedrus imagines tribades as a drunken mistake by which women are physically fixed with “masculine members,” and he is not the only writer to depict tribades in this way. Many writers show tribades penetrating their lovers without detailing how they are doing so, leaving their readers to imagine for themselves the possibilities. There are several extant sources, however, that can inform the modern reader on what those possibilities may have been. The first (and I think most likely) possibility is the use of an artificial phallus, much like strap-ons are used today. In Erotes, a Lucianic text written sometime from the 2nd to the 4th century,21 two men debate over whether the love of women or the love of boys is better. While arguing against pederasty, the character Charicles states that if pederasty is tolerated, female homoeroticism must too be allowed, saying “Having strapped onto themselves objects of licentious organs made by handiwork, a monstrous mystery of barren [women], let them lie together, woman with woman,

21 It is unclear whether the text was written by Lucian himself or a Lucian imitator. For more discussion on the matter, see James Jope, “Interpretation and Authenticity of the Lucianic Erotes,” in Helios 38.1 (2011): 103-120.

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just as man” (σελγῶν δὲ ὀργάνων ὑποζυγωσάμεναι τέχνασμα, σπόρων τεράστιον αἴνιγμα, κοιμάσθωσαν γυνὴ μετὰ γυναικὸς ὡς ανήρ). 22 Though it is impossible to determine how frequently women used these “objects of licentious organs,” this text shows that it was clearly a possibility in the Roman mind. In addition to this, the 1st century author Seneca the Elder tells a story in his Controversies of a man who catches his wife in bed with another person whose gender is not immediately apparent. He quotes the husband, saying “I myself examined first the man, if he was one inborn or stitched on” (ἐγὼ δ᾿ ἐσκόπησα2 πρότερον τὸν ἄνδρα, <εἰ>3 ἐγγεγένηταί τις ἢ προσέρραπται).23 Here too, then, we have reference to some sort of apparatus used for penetrating.

Other writers suggest, though, that these artificial devices may not always be necessary, instead depicting tribades as having massive clitorises capable of penetration. In his epigram on a tribas named Bassa, Martial refers to the woman’s prodigiosa Venus,24 which some authors have interpreted as her “monstrous clitoris.”25 Other scholars, however, suggest that this interpretation may not be valid, instead thinking it more likely that Martial is referring to Bassa’s lust rather than clitoris. James Butrica, indeed, translates the phrase as “remarkable lovemaking,” saying that there is “no evidence for Venus in the sense of ‘clitoris,’” but also admitting that the term Venus is used to mean the penis of a man in Lucretius 4.1269.26 Though I agree that it is more likely that Martial is not talking about Bassa’s clitoris here, there is something to be said for translating it as such, considering that this descriptor comes directly after the statement, “you

22 Lucian, Erotes 28.
23 Seneca, Controversiae 1.2.23.
24 Martial, Epigrams 1.90.
25 Swancutt goes even farther than this, translating it as “penis.” Though we do have reference to the word venus being used to describe male genitalia, this use is incredibly rare in comparison to its other meanings, and I think it highly unlikely that it is referring to a phallus here. Martial, though, may have left this intentionally ambiguous.
26 James L. Butrica, “Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality,” in Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, ed. Beert C. Verstraete and Vernon Provencal (Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, 2005), 255.

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dare to mutually join together twin cunts” (inter se geminos audes committere cunnos),27 and that he could be describing how she does so. Supporting this theory, a translation of a medical text originally written by the Greek physician Soranus speaks of the necessary measures to take when a woman’s clitoris is of “a large uncouth size” (horrida magnitudo).28 Not only does he recommend cutting the clitoris off, but emphasizes that the reason for doing so is not to treat any physical discomfort, but because women with a large clitoris “affected by the lust [or: erection] (typical) of men, similarly assume an appetite, and they come into Venus (i.e., with men) [only when] forced” (ipse adfecte tentigine virorum simile appetentiam sumunt et in venerem coacte veniunt).29 This makes it clear, then, that some thought that a large clitoris meant not only an increased sex drive, but probably also an increased propensity for same-sex desire.30 It is possible that certain writers, unaware of or resistant to the ways in which women actually have sex, would envisage clitorises so large that they were capable of and used for penetration.

Because there is a general silence on the topic of female homoeroticism (with the obvious exception of Sappho’s poetry) before the Roman invasion of Greece in 146 BCE, it is impossible to know for certain how the Greeks viewed female homoeroticism whilst still independent of the Romans. That being said, given the reverence that many Greek writers expressed towards Sappho and her poetry, as well as several Greek vase paintings depicting erotic scenes between women, it is likely that they were at least more tolerant than the Romans. In the 4th century BCE, however, Plato denounces all forms of homosexuality in his Laws, saying “It must be considered that the pleasure concerning these things seems to have been given over in accordance with

27 Martial, Epigrams 1.90.
28 Caelius Aurelianus, Gynaecia 112.
29 Ibid.
30 It is possible that Soranus is instead referring to a desire to penetrate people of any gender. Most texts about tribades, however, reference a specific sexual preference towards women (though not always an exclusive one).

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nature to the female nature and to the nature of males when it comes into intercourse of procreation, but [the pleasure] of men with men or [the pleasure] of women with women is contrary to nature” (ἐννοητέον ὅτι τῇ θηλείᾳ καὶ τῇ τῶν ἀῤῥένων φύσει εἰς κοινωνίαν ἰούσῃ τῆςγεννήσεως ἡ περὶ ταῦτα ἡδονὴ κατὰ φύσιν  ποδεδόσθαι δοκεῖ, ἀῤῥένων δὲ πρὸς ἄῤῥενας ἢθηλειῶν πρὸς θηλείας παρὰ φύσιν).31 In the early 2nd century BCE, Asclepiades too gives a possible condemnation of female homoeroticism, saying “The Samian women Bitton and Nannion  will not go to the place of Aphrodite by her customs, but they desert to other things, which are not fine. Mistress Cypris, hate the ones who flee from the marriage-bed beside you” (Αἱ Σάμιαι Βιττὼ καὶ Νάννιον εἰς Ἀφροδίτης/ φοιτᾶν τοῖς αὐτῆς οὐκ ἐθέλουσι νόμοις,/ εἰς δ’ ἕτερ’ αὐτομολοῦσιν, ἃ μὴ καλά. δεσπότι Κύπρι,/ μίσει τὰς κοίτης τῆς παρὰ σοὶ φυγάδας).32 While neither of these texts suggest a cultural distaste for female homoeroticism and the views that they express could very well have been in the minority, they at the very least show that female homoeroticism was starting to be denounced even before a strong Roman influence took hold. More importantly, neither text suggests an active or passive partner; rather, they both show and condemn a mutual and reciprocal erotic relationship between women.

Along with the fable by Phaedrus, Seneca’s Controversies contains one of the two oldest extant uses of the word tribas, in which he tells a story of a man walking in to find his wife being fucked by another woman. Upon examining the adulterer to determine that she is, indeed, a woman, he kills both her and his wife. Though Seneca refers to both women as tribades (rather than just the penetrative lover), he still creates an active/passive relationship between the two women. The lover is not only actively penetrating the wife when the husband finds them, but the

31 Plato, Nomoi 1.636B-C.
32 Asclepiades, Anthologia Graeca 5.207.

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husband also describes her as an ἄνδρα, a man. Still, the rest of the passage shows that the husband does not handle the situation as he would have if he had caught his wife having sex with a man, a discrepancy that I will explore in greater detail in the next section.

Writing in the first century, Ovid includes the story of Iphis and Ianthe in his famous epic Metamorphoses. This story is about a woman named Iphis who was raised as a boy, after her father regretfully told her mother—still pregnant with her—to kill the child if it was not a male. Isis comes to her in a dream, however, and tells her to raise the child as a boy rather than killing her. So Iphis grows up with her father thinking that she is male, and when she becomes of marriageable age, he finds for her a beautiful bride named Ianthe, with whom Iphis is passionately in love. She knows, however, that their marriage cannot be consummated, and she, distraught, makes the following speech:

“quis me manet exitus,” inquit
“cognita quam nulli, quam prodigiosa novaeque cura tenet Veneris? Si di mihi parcere vellent, parcere debuerant; si non, et perdere vellent, naturale malum saltem et de more dedissent.
Nec vaccam vaccae, nec equas amor urit equarum: urit oves aries, sequitur sua femina cervum.
Sic et aves coeunt, interque animalia cuncta femina femineo conrepta cupidine nulla est. Vellem nulla forem! Ne non tamen omnia Crete monstra ferat, taurum dilexit filia Solis,
femina nempe marem: meus est furiosior illo,
si verum profitemur, amor! Tamen illa secuta est spem Veneris, tamen illa dolis et imagine vaccae passa bovem est, et erat, qui deciperetur adulter! Huc licet e toto sollertia confluat orbe,
ipse licet revolet ceratis Daedalus alis,
quid faciet? Num me puerum de virgine doctis

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artibus efficiet? num te mutabit, Ianthe?”33

“What death waits for me,” she said, “whom concern for a new Venus possesses – a concern known by no one and monstrous? If the gods wanted to spare me, they should have spared me; if not, and they wanted to destroy me, they could at least have given me an evil natural and according to custom. Love does not inflame a cow for a cow, nor mares for mares: love inflames rams for sheep, his own doe follows the stag. Thus also the birds come together, and among all animals no female has been seized by lust for a female. I wish that I were no woman! Nevertheless, lest Crete not bear all monstrosities, the daughter of the Sun loved a bull, certainly a female and male: my love is more furious than that, if I am professing the truth! Yet that woman followed an expectation of Venus, yet she by deceptions and by the likeness of a cow experienced her bull, and it was the adulterer who was deceived! Should ingenuity from the whole world meet here, should Daedelus himself fly back with his waxed wings, what would he do? For with his learned arts will he make me a boy from a maiden? For will he change you, Ianthe?

Despite her cynicism, however, the story does not end poorly for Iphis. After her mother prays to Isis for help, the goddess transforms Iphis into a man, and he and Ianthe properly marry.

Though Ovid himself does not pass any negative judgment on Iphis (as he does other desiring women in his poetry), he shows through her own feelings the disdain that her culture has for female homoeroticism. Iphis laments because her desire for a woman is unnatural—even more so, in her mind, than Pasiphaë’s desire for a bull. Indeed she is so engrained with the phallocentric model that she cannot imagine any amount of ingenuity that would allow her to consummate her marriage with another woman. Thus Iphis, a female masquerading as a male and taking on a man’s role, desires a woman (as no woman should) but cannot reconcile this desire with her lack of penis. Very little attention is given to her bride-to-be, as she does not know the true sex of Iphis, but

33 Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.727-44.

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thinks that she is marrying a man. This story, then, seems at first glance to fit nicely into our current views of Roman sexuality: there is an emphasis on phallocentricism in sex, a shame associated with being a masculine and desiring female, and a lack of care or attention for the partner who is acting within her gender role.

The comparison that Iphis makes between her own desires and the desires of animals is not an uncommon one in antiquity, though it is not always as negative as Iphis makes it. In his book Foucault’s Virginity, Goldhill discusses the ancient views on animal nature versus human nature, especially in regards to sexuality. He cites several ancient texts that discuss animal and human nature, including one written by a first century author named Straton:

πᾶν ἄλογον ζῷον βινεῖ μόνον· οἱ λογικοὶ δὲ
τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων τοῦτ’ἔχομεν τὸ πλέον,
πυγίζειν εὑρόντες. ὅσοι δὲ γυναιξὶ κρατοῦνται,
τῶν  λόγων ζῴων οὐδὲν ἔχουσι πλέον.
Every unreasoning animal just screws; but we have reason
And excel the other animals in this:
We have discovered buggery. All who are ruled by women
Have no more going for them than the unreasoning beasts.34

Here, then, male homoeroticism at least is shown as “man’s triumph over the beasts, over nature,”35 rather than a cause for shame due to unnaturalness. Indeed, in the Roman mind—more especially in Ovid—there is a clear hierarchy of beings. Pintabone cites an early episode in Metamorphoses to explain this hierarchy, in which animals are described as being less divine than humans, whereas gods are obviously more divine.36 If she were male, then, it would be

34 Straton, Anthologia Graeca 12.22, trans. Simon Goldhill in Foucault’s Virginity (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995), 63.
35 Simon Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995), 63.
36 Diane T. Pintabone, “Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe: When Girls Won’t Be Girls,” in Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, ed. Nancy S. Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 260.

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inappropriate and inaccurate for Iphis to compare her own desire to that of animals, for she would be considered more highly evolved than animals and therefore not a slave to nature. As a female, though, her point is never shown to be wrong, and the resolution in her story comes from her eventually being turned into a man, rather than accepting her transcendence of “nature.” Women, then, do not get the same luxury of defending their homoerotic desires as Straton shows men having. Indeed, with the preoccupation of procreation in Augustan Rome, it is a woman’s duty to obey the nature of the female body: to be penetrated and impregnated by men.

In the second century, Martial writes three epigrams detailing women who engage in homoerotic relationships. In his first book of epigrams, he writes the following poem to a woman named Bassa:

Quod numquam maribus iunctam te, Bassa, videbam
Quodque tibi moechum fabula nulla dabat,
Omne sed officium circa te semper obibat
Turba tui sexus, non adeunte viro,
Esse videbaris, fateor, Lucretia nobis:
At tu, pro facinus, Bassa, fututor eras.
Inter se geminos audes committere cunnos
Mentiturque virum prodigiosa Venus.
Commenta es dignum Thebano aenigmate monstrum,
Hic ubi vir non est, ut sit adulterium.37

Because I never saw you joined with men, Bassa, and because no story gave to you an adulterer, but a crowd of your own sex surrounding you was always attending each duty, not with a man attending, you seemed to us to be, I admit, a Lucretia:38 But you, for your evil deed, Bassa, were a fucker. You dare to mutually join together twin cunts and your unnatural “Venus” feigns a man. You have invented a monstrosity worthy of the Theban riddle: Where here there is no man, there is adultery.

37 Martial, Epigrams 1.90.
38 A famously chaste woman, whose rape was said to have caused the end of the Roman monarchy.

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Though Martial never explicitly calls Bassa a tribas in this epigram, he certainly depicts her as such. Firstly, he calls her a fututor, or a “fucker,” which Parker lists as an active man who vaginally penetrates a woman.39 It is highly unusual for a woman to be described in this way, and emphasizes the active role that Bassa plays in her sexual relationships. He also refers to her prodigiosaVenus. As noted above, there is some disagreement as to what “Venus” means in this context, with some translating it as “clitoris” or even “penis” (a translation which I myself find highly unlikely), and some taking it to mean her sex drive. Though these translations have different implications, they both imply the masculinity of Bassa. Either she is so masculine that she biologically resembles a male with her overly large clitoris, or she has such a strong desire for sex that she rivals men. Lastly, she has solved the “Theban riddle” by providing women with a means of adultery that does not include a biological male. At first glance, Bassa has taken the role of fututor, rivaling men either anatomically or with her “prodigious” sex drive, and adulterating women just like men. She seems to fit nicely, then, into the phallocentric model of Roman sexuality. There is, however, language of reciprocity in the epigram which calls into question just how active and phallicized Bassa really is. I will discuss this at greater lengths in my next section.

Martial’s portrayal of Bassa in this poem is clearly negative. Though Butrica claims that the poem displays no animosity towards female homoeroticism and is rather about Martial “as a failed diviner who rectifies his error,”40 the language used in the poem (as well as the general invective nature of Martial’s poetry) shows this to be an unlikely conclusion. Butrica claims that the words monstrum and prodigiosa are not, in fact, negative, but only express the strangeness of

39 Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” 49.
40 James L. Butrica, “Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality,” 254.

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the problem that Martial is faced with.41 He neglects to discuss the word facinus, however, which has no connotation of strangeness, and instead is often used to mean “crime.” He also neglects to mention the use of the word audes (meaning “you dare”), which Martial would not have used if Bassa was doing something socially acceptable. Thus this poem is one of many pieces of writing that displays the stigmatization of female homoeroticism in the Roman Empire.

In his seventh book of epigrams, Martial writes two poems about a woman named Philaenis. The first has much to say about Philaenis, though nothing good:

Pedicat pueros tribas Philaenis
et tentigine saevior mariti
undenas dolat in die puellas.
harpasto quoque subligata ludit,
et flavescit haphe, gravesque draucis
halteras facili rotat lacerto,
et putri lutulenta de palaestra
uncti verbere vapulat magistri:
nec cenat prius aut recumbit ante
quam septem vomuit meros deunces;
ad quos fas sibi tunc putat redire,
cum colophia sedecim comedit.
post haec omnia cum libidinatur,
non fellat (putat hoc parum virile),
sed plane medias vorat puellas.
di mentem tibi dent tuam, Philaeni,
cunnum lingere quae putas virile.42

Philaenis the tribas anally fucks boys and, more raging than the lust of a husband, she bangs eleven girls in a day. Having been fastened,43 she also plays with a ball, and she becomes yellow in the sand, and she swings heavy weights with a more easy arm than athletes, and muddy from the putrid palaestra she is beaten with a flog by an oiled instructor: And she neither dines nor reclines before she has

41 Ibid.
42 Martial, Epigrams 7.67.
43 Probably with some kind of loincloth or belt.

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vomited seven deunces^44 of undiluted wine; to which she thinks it right for her to return afterwards, when she eats sixteen pieces of meat. After all these things, when she gratifies lust, she does not suck dick (she thinks that this is not manly enough), but she wholly devours the middles of girls. May the gods give your mind to you, Phillaenis, you who think that licking cunt is manly.

It is very unlikely that Martial is speaking in this poem about a real woman whom he knows, and as Boehringer states in her article about the name Philaenis, “The same name does not designate a specific person, who existed and whom Martial had met, but it very often refers, as various commentators have noticed, to a large group of individuals afflicted with the same faults or behaving in the same manner.”45 Martial writes this poem, then, not to mock a specific person, but to satirize the figure of the tribas, displaying and exaggerating all of her stereotypes. For him, the tribas is an active and penetrative woman who desires to be hyper-masculine, but being a woman, does not understand the nuances of masculinity. She plays at masculinity by penetrating both boys and girls, playing sports, eating an abundance of meats, and over-drinking. She knows enough about masculinity to know that she should not fellate men, but unknowingly makes herself passive and disgusting by performing oral sex on women. Additionally, she most likely exercises wearing some sort of clothing, as suggested by the participle subligata. At this time period in Rome, however, some textual evidence suggests that Romans exercised completely naked, as the Greeks did.46 Elsewhere, in fact, Martial states to a matron “The gymnasium, the warm baths, and the stadium are in this part: retreat. We are being undressed: refrain to look at the naked men” (gymnasium, thermae, stadium est hac parte: recede./ exuimur:

44 About 6 pints, according to Shackleton-Bailey, in Martial, Epigrams trans. D. R. Shackleton-Bailey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 133.
45 Sandra Boehringer, “What is Named by the Name ‘Philaenis’: Gender, Function, and Authority of an Antonomastic Figure,” 382.
46 Jason König (2005) 171 argues that the Romans did not approve of exercising naked, though his argument applies more to the Republic than the Empire. Indeed, he states that it is “not at all clear how long Roman resistance to that Greek custom lasted.” For discussion on nudity existing in Roman athletics, see Nigel B. Crowther in “Nudity and Morality: Athletics in Italy,” The Classical Journal 76.2 (1980): 119–123.

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nudos parce videre viros).47 However much Philaenis tries to assert her masculinity by being a proficient athlete, she falls short of her goal by not exercising like a true Roman man. Though she attempts to fit herself into both a culturally and sexually masculine (and phallic) role, she fails, blurring the phallocentric lines between activity and passivity, between masculinity and femininity.

Martial’s second epigram about Philaenis is much shorter and more direct, but still worth examining: “Tribas of the very tribades, Philaenis, rightly, the girl whom you fuck, you call your girlfriend” (Ipsarum tribadum tribas, Philaeni,/ Recte, quam futuis, vocas amicam).48 Here, Philaenis is not portrayed as being falsely masculine or as a woman playing at something that she cannot be. She is called by the same name and title (tribas) as the woman in the previous epigram, but this time, there is no indication that she is performing masculinity in the wrong way. Indeed, she vaginally fucks a woman rather than performing cunnilingus on her, and she labels her as her girlfriend, or mistress, just as many Roman poets do with their lovers. More importantly than her actions is Martial’s assessment that she does this recte, or “rightly.” Though he is by no means passing a positive moral judgment on Philaenis, he agrees that she and her lover perform the roles of a man and his girlfriend, and can thus be labeled as such.

Also living in the second century, Lucian writes Dialogues of the Courtesans, in which he shares several fictional stories of ἑταῖραι (a kind of high-class prostitute common in Ancient Greece). Amongst them, he writes a dialogue between two courtesans named Clonarium and Leaena, the latter of whom tells a story about a female client named Megilla, and her wife Demonassa. Clonarium starts the dialogue by questioning Leaena about the rumors she has been

47 Martial, Epigrams 3.68.3-4.
48 Martial, Epigrams 7.70.

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hearing that a wealthy woman from Lesbos has enlisted the services of Leaena. After Leaena confirms this (though immediately expressing shame about the entire affair), Clonarium tries to ascertain the details of their relationship, asking “By the one rearing children, what is the act, or what does the woman want? And what do you even accomplish, whenever you are together?” (Πρὸς τῆς κουροτρόφου τί τὸ πρᾶγμα, ἢ τί βούλεται ἡ γυνή; τί δὲ καὶ πράττετε, ὅταν συνῆτε;)49

Clonarium takes an attitude typical of a Roman male here, utterly baffled by how sex can occur without a penis. By writing this, Lucian is both recognizing the phallocentricism of Roman sex and the rarity with which female homoeroticism is discussed, while still acknowledging (through his very writing of the dialogue) that female homoeroticism does exist, and that women can have sex without a penis involved.

Leaena responds that “the woman is terribly manly” (ἡ γυνὴ δὲ δεινῶς  νδρική ἐστιν),50 and Clonarium suggests that she might be like the women in Lesbos, who look masculine and only have sex with other women. Leaena then recounts the story of her first sexual encounter with Megilla and Demonassa. After playing music at a drinking party for them (as was common for ἑταῖραι), “Megilla said ‘Come indeed, Leaena, for already it is fine to go to bed, lie down here between the two of us” (Ἄγε δή, ἔφη, ὦ Λέαινα, ἡ Μέγιλλα, κοιμᾶσθαι γὰρ ἤδη καλόν, ἐνταῦθα κάθευδε μεθ’ἡμῶν μέση  μφοτέρων).51 She continues the story:

Ἐφίλουν με τὸ πρῶτον ὥσπερ οἱ ἄνδρες, οὐκ αὐτὸ μόνον προσαρμόζουσαι τὰ χείλη,  λλ᾿ ὑπανοίγουσαι τὸ στόμα, καὶ περιέβαλλον καὶ τοὺς μαστοὺς ἔθλιβον· ἡ Δημώνασσα δὲ καὶ ἔδακνε μεταξὺ καταφιλοῦσα· ἐγὼ δὲ οὐκ εἶχον εἰκάσαι ὅ τι τὸ πρᾶγμα εἴη. χρόνῳ δὲ ἡ Μέγιλλα ὑπόθερμος ἤδη οὖσα τὴν μὲν πηνήκην  φείλετο τῆς κεφαλῆς, ἐπέκειτο δὲ πάνυ ὁμοία καὶ προσφυής, καὶ ἐν χρῷ ὤφθη αὐτὴ καθάπερ οἱ σφόδρα  νδρώδεις τῶν  θλητῶν  ποκεκαρμένη· καὶ ἐγὼ ἐταράχθην

49 Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans 5.1.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 5.2.

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ἰδοῦσα. ἡ δέ, Ὦ Λέαινα, φησίν, ἑώρακας ἤδη οὕτω καλὸν νεανίσκον; Ἀλλ᾿ οὐχ ὁρῶ, ἔφην, ἐνταῦθα νεανίσκον, ὦ Μέγιλλα. Μή καταθήλυνέ με, ἔφη, Μέγιλλος γὰρ ἐγὼ λέγομαι καὶ γεγάμηκα πρόπαλαι ταύτην τὴν Δημώνασσαν, καὶ ἔστιν ἐμὴ γυνή.52

First they kissed me just as men, not only fitting closely their same lips, but opening their mouth, and they embraced me and they squeezed my breasts; and Demonassa even bit me while kissing me; and I myself could not guess what the act was. And in time, Megilla already being somewhat hot took away the wig from her head, and it was resting upon [her head] very much like [real hair] and [as if] attached by growth, and she herself was seen shorn close to the skin just like the exceedingly manly ones of the athletes; and I myself was troubled seeing this. But she said “O Leaena, before this, have you seen such a fine young man?” I said “But I do not see a young man here, O Megilla. “Do not make me womanish,” she said, “For I say that I am Megillus and I have married long ago this woman Demonassa, and she is my wife.” Leaena takes this to mean that Megilla is anatomically male, and suggests several ways that this could be possible. Megilla, however, assures her that she has no penis and was born a woman, saying “I do not have that; but I do not altogether need it; you will see that I have intercourse in my own much more pleasant way” (Ἐκεῖνο μέν, ἔφη, ὦ Λέαινα, οὐκ ἔχω· δέομαι δὲ οὐδὲ πάνυαὐτοῦ· ἴδιον δέ τινα τρόπον ἡδίω παρὰ πολὺ ὁμιλοῦντα ὄψει με)53 and “Certainly not, Leaena, but I was born just like you other women, but my mind and my desire and all other things are of a man for me” (Οὔκουν, ὦ Λέαινα, ἔφη,  λλὰ ἐγεννήθην μὲν ὁμοία ταῖς ἄλλαις ὑμῖν, ἡ γνώμη δὲ καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία καὶ τἆλλα πάντανδρός ἐστί μοι).54 She does, however, imply that she uses some kind of artificial phallus, saying “for I have something (that I use) instead of the thing of a man” (ἔχω γάρ τι  ντὶ τοῦ  νδρείου).55 The reader never gets to learn about this substitute or her “more pleasant way,” however, for when Clonarium asks Leaena to explain, she replies “Do not

52 Ibid., 5.3.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 5.4.
55 Ibid.

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examine the things closely, for they are causing shame; and so by the one dwelling in heaven I would not say” (Μὴ ἀνάκρινε ἀκριβῶς, αἰσχρὰ γάρ· ὥστε μὰ τὴν οὐρανίαν οὐκ ἂν εἴποιμι).56

Though both Leaena and Clonarium express confusion about the act of female-female sex and the existence of women who pursue it, Clonarium does immediately draw a parallel to the women of Lesbos, showing that she does indeed have a cultural standard for this kind of activity. Lucian again is simultaneously expressing the enigma of female homoeroticism and acknowledging the existence and stereotypes of it: as much as people may want to deny the reality of female-female sex, they know it occurs and have even developed a standard for it. Megilla fits this standard well. She does absolutely everything in a masculine way: her kisses are manly, her head is shaven, she refers to herself as a man and asks to be called by a man’s name, and she even has a wife. Indeed, in our culture, we would be more likely to categorize her as a transgender man than a lesbian. Assuming that her “more pleasant way” involves penetration of some kind (which is a probable assumption, given the evidence in the text as well as the phallocentric ideology of the time period), Megilla, at least, fits the phallocentric model as closely as someone who is not anatomically male is able to. As for Leaena and Demonassa, I will discuss their relationship with gender roles in the next section.

Though Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans has little commentary on the morality or social appropriateness of female homoeroticism (apart from the shame that Laeana displays), the Lucianic Erotes leaves a much stronger impression against female-female sex. As stated above, the character Charicles uses female homoeroticism to explain why pederasty is repugnant, saying the following:

56 Ibid.

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ὥστ᾿ εἰ <ἡ> μὲν καὶ ὑμῖν  ρέσκειν δύναται, πρὸς  λλήλους δὴ ἡμεῖς
ποτειχισώμεθα, εἰ δὲ τοῖς ἄρρεσιν εὐπρεπεῖς αἱ μετὰ  ρρένων ὁμιλίαι, πρὸς τὸ λοιπὸν ἐράτωσαν  λλήλων καὶ γυναῖκες. ἄγε νῦν, ὦ νεώτερε χρόνε καὶ τῶν ξένων ἡδονῶν νομοθέτα, καινὰς ὁδοὺς ἄρρενος τρυφῆς ἐπινοήσας χάρισαι τὴν ἴσην ἐξουσίαν καὶ γυναιξίν, καὶ  λλήλαις ὁμιλησάτωσαν ὡς ἄνδρες·  σελγῶν δὲ ὀργάνων ὑποζυγωσάμεναι τέχνασμα,  σπόρων τεράστιον αἴνιγμα, κοιμάσθωσαν γυνὴ μετὰ γυναικὸς ὡς  νήρ· τὸ δὲ εἰς  κοὴν σπανίως ἧκον ὄνομα—αἰσχύνομαι καὶ λέγειν—τῆς τριβακῆς  σελγείας  νέδην πομπευέτω. πᾶσα δ᾿ ἡμῶν ἡ γυναικωνῖτις ἔστω Φιλαινὶς  νδρογύνους ἔρωτας  σχημονοῦσα. καὶ πόσῳ κρεῖττον εἰς ἄρρενα τρυφὴν βιάζεσθαι γυναῖκα ἢ τὸ γενναῖον νδρῶν εἰς γυναῖκα θηλύνεσθαι;57

And so if [Aphrodite] is able to please even you, let we ourselves wall ourselves off from each other, but if the intercourses of males with males are acceptable, hereafter let women also love each other. Come now, O younger time and lawmaker of strange pleasures, having contrived unusual passages for male wantonness, give freely the equal power to even women, and let them consort with each other as men; and having strapped onto themselves objects of licentious organs made by handiwork, a monstrous mystery of barren [women], let them lie together, woman with woman, just as man. And the name rarely having come into hearing—I am ashamed even to say it—the licentiousness of a tribas,58 let it parade ostentatiously. And let each apartment of our women be Philaenis, behaving unseemly with respect to androgynous lusts. And how much better that women be forced into male wantonness than that the nobility of men be made effeminate regarding a woman?

Unlike the mostly satirical and light-hearted literary texts that I have examined up to this point, this text shows the serious disdain that people in the Roman world had for female homoeroticism, and especially for penetrative women.59 Though Charicles is acknowledging the existence of such women (something that few authors ever did), he is treating them with the highest contempt. His feelings go beyond mere mockery, and he expresses shame at even

57 Lucian, Erotes 28.
58 The author of this text does not use the typical Greek τριβάς, but rather uses the genitive form of τριβακός, which literally means “rubbed woman.”
59 Butrica disagrees with this assessment, saying that because the argument is actually about pederasty, it is “not a comment on lesbianism per se.” The argument, though, had to come from somewhere, and I see no reason for the author to have included it if it had not been true to Greco-Roman culture.

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mentioning tribadism.60 Though he ultimately states for the purpose of his argument that it is better for a woman to become masculine than a man to become feminine, he is clearly more personally affronted by female homoeroticism than he is by pederasty; after all, he can at least speak openly about the latter without expressing shame. His argument, too, is meant to shock his opposition. The mere suggestion that female-female sex could be comparable to the long-standing tradition of pederasty should call into question the validity and morality of that tradition. Sandra Boehringer says the following about the comparison: “The logic is as follows: the more horrifying is the picture, the stronger will be the rejection of this kind of sexual relations, and the more convincing his discourse. But Charicles loses his bet. No one in his audience could possibly accept his first implication, postulating a common category of relations between men and relations between women.”61 His attempt, therefore, to compare lustful, penetrative, and masculine women to those involved in pederasty fails: the two subjects are too different to have validity, and Charicles loses his argument.

Up until this point, I have exclusively examined sources that aim to either satirize or provide moral commentary on female homoeroticism. While these sources are undoubtedly useful in understanding a culture, they all by their very natures have to be biased, and so usually exaggerate the characteristics of the people about whom they are writing. It is important, therefore, to also examine less biased sources. In the case of female homoeroticism, astrological and medical texts are both helpful.62 Because the discussion for both has the possibility of being quite

60 Here, too, we have a possible explanation for the scarcity of extant texts with references to tribades.
61 Sandra Boehringer, “What is Named by the Name ‘Philaenis’: Gender, Function, and Authority of an
Antonomastic Figure,” 385.
62 Artistic representation is also incredibly important and helpful, but requires too much discussion for this paper. For exploration of Greco-Roman art as it relates to female homoeroticism, see Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996); John R. Clarke, “Sexuality and Visual Representation,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, ed. Thomas K. Hubbard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2014); and John R. Clarke and Michael Larvey, Roman Sex: 100 B.C.to 250 A.D (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003).

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extensive, however, I have chosen one passage for each that is more-or-less representative of its respective field.63 Astrological texts were quite common in classical antiquity, and many of them sought to explain why people sometimes acted outside of their ascribed gender roles and preferred certain kinds of sex. Among the authors of these texts was Ptolemy, a second century writer and famous astrologer, astronomer, and mathematician. Most famously, he authored Tetrabiblos, a text “which enjoyed comparable popularity for a number of centuries,”64 in which he briefly discusses femalehomoeroticism in a section entitled (not insignificantly) “Concerning Sufferings of the Soul” (Περὶπαθῶν ψυχικῶν). Already, then, we see that though he views female homoeroticism as something uncontrollable, as something determined by the planets and the stars, this does not preclude an expression of negativity. Women who desire other women are suffering in their very souls.

Furthermore, he speaks of sexuality in terms of what is “natural” (κατὰ φύσιν), where men are active and women are passive. Anything that deviates from this, however, is “contrary to nature” (παρὰ φύσιν): quite a value judgement, considering that this all, in Ptolemy’s mind, occurs naturally by the movement of the planets.

Ptolemy writes specifically about tribades in his section on sufferings of the soul, saying:

ἐὰν δὲ καὶ ὁ τοῦ Ἄρεως ἢ καὶ ὁ τῆς Ἀφροδίτης ἤτοι ὁπότερος ἢ καὶ  μφότεροι ὦσιν ἠρρενωμένοι, οἱ μὲν ἄνδρες πρὸς τὰς κατὰ φύσιν συνουσίας γίνονται καταφερεῖς καὶ μοιχικοὶ καὶ κόρεστοι καὶ ἐν παντὶ καιρῷ πρόχειροι πρός τε τὰ αἰσχρὰ καὶ τὰ παράνομα τῶν φροδισίων· αἱ δὲ γυναῖκες πρὸς τὰς παρὰ φύσιν ὁμιλίας λάγναι καὶ ῥιψόφθαλμοι καὶ αἱ καλούμεναι τριβάδες· διατιθέασι δὲ θηλείας,  νδρῶν ἔργα ἐπιτελοῦσαι. κἂν μὲν μόνος ὁ τῆς Ἀφροδίτης ἠρρενωμένος

63 For a more complete discussion, see Brooten, who has a section of her book devoted to each.
64 Brooten, Love Between Women, 124.

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ᾖ, λάθρα καὶ οὐκ  ναφανδόν· ἐὰν δὲ καὶ ὁ τοῦ Ἄρεως, ἄντικρυς ὥστε ἐνίοτε καὶ νομίμας ὥσπερ γυναῖκας τὰς διατιθεμένας ἀναδεικνύειν.65

But if also either or both the one of Ares or even the one of Aphrodite truly have become masculine, the men become inclined toward natural intercourses and become adulterous and insatiate and in every due measure ready for both the disgraceful and the lawless things of sexual pleasures; but women [become]
lustful toward intercourses contrary to nature and casting their eyes about and they are called tribades; and they manage females, accomplishing the deeds of men. And if the one of Aphrodite alone has become masculine, they do this secretly and not openly; but if also the one of Ares has become masculine, they do this openly so that sometimes even managing them like lawful wives they display
them.

The actual planets involved varies among astrological texts, and is not entirely important to this discussion. More important is the language that Ptolemy uses to describe tribades. He states straightaway that these women are unnatural (and therefore active), but more significantly he specifies the gender to which they are attracted. They are not only active women, they are active specifically with other women. It is not beyond reason that they could take an active role in sex with men, as we have seen through our analysis of cunnilingus and our reading of Martial’s poem about Phillaenis, who anally penetrates boys. Still, they specifically “deal with females” (διατιθέασι θηλείας) and sometimes even mark them as their “wives” (γυναῖκας). Being a tribas, then, is not solely about activity or masculinization, but also about a woman’s specific sexual desire for women.

Unfortunately, we do not have nearly as many medical texts concerning female homoeroticism as we do astrological texts, with most of our sources being later translations of original works (which are now lost) by a physician named Soranus in the early second century. The main translator of his work is Caelius Aurelianus, who was writing in the fifth century, and

65 Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos 3.14.171-2.

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though we do not have the original text for comparison, scholars believe that his work was accurate and meticulous.66 In his translation of a text entitled On Chronic Disease, Caelius Aurelianus writes about effeminate men and compares them to tribades:

Est enim, ut Soranus ait, malignae ac foedissimae mentis passio. Nam sicut feminae tribades appellatae, quod utramque venerem exerceant, mulieribus magis quam viris misceri festinant et easdem invidentia paene virile sectantur, et cum passione fuerint desertae seu temporaliter relevatae, ea quaerunt aliis obicere quae
pati noscuntur iuvamini humilitate duplici sexu confectam, velut frequenter ebrietate corruptae in novas libidinis formas erumpentes, consuetudine turpi nutritae, sui sexus iniuriis gaudent: sic illi comparatione talium animi passione iactari noscuntur. Nam neque ulla curatio corporis depellendae passionis causa recte putatur adhibenda, sed potius animus coercendus qui tanta peccatorum labe vexatur.67

For, as Soranus says, it is a passion of a wicked and very filthy mind. For just as women called tribades, because they practice each Venus, they hasten to mix with women more than with men and they pursue the same [women?] with almost masculine jealousy, and when they have been deserted by or temporarily relieved of their passion, (they seek to subject others to what they learn that a woman composed of double sex experiences by means of an humiliating aid),68 as if frequently corrupted by drunkenness, breaking out into new forms of lust, nourished by their shameful habit, they rejoice in the affronts of their own sex: thus those minds of such men (pathics) in comparison learn to toss about in
passion. For it is incorrect to think that any treatment of the body should be applied for the sake of expelling passion, but rather the mind should be restrained which is vexed by so great a defect of sins.

Similar to the other texts that we have seen, Soranus describes tribades as being masculine, active, and lustful. He also notes that they have a preference (though not necessarily

66 Brooten, Love Between Women, 147 n11.
67 Caelius Aurelianus, On Chronic Diseases 4.9.
68 ea quaerunt aliis obicere quae pati noscuntur iuvamini humilitate duplici sexu confectam; the text is probably corrupt. Drabkin notes: “Text and meaning are unclear. Perhaps ‘in (or to overcome) their degradation they seek to blame others for their affliction; then plagued by double sexuality, etc.’ But ea…noscuntur may refer to renewed (heterosexual?) promiscuity.” For a summary of the problem and various conjectures, see Brooten, Love Between Women, 152-155.

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an exclusive one) for women. He does not suggest, as astrological texts from the same time period do, that this affliction is natural and faultless. Rather, he claims that effeminacy of men and tribadism of women come from a “wicked and very filthy mind” (malignae ac foedissimae mentis), and that there is no physical cure, but “but rather the mind should be restrained which is vexed by so great a defect of sins.” Thus Soranus not only entirely places the blame on those engaging in these behaviors, but he is also suggesting that the problem must be “restrained” (sed potius animus coercendus qui tanta peccatorum labe vexatur). For him, any sexual deviation from accepted gender roles is a disease, and must be cured.

Both the astrological text of Ptolemy and the medical text of Caelius Aurelianus appeal to an archetype for female homoeroticism familiar from the literary texts we have already examined. The literary texts show nearly universally at least one woman who has masculinized herself, who actively pursues other women, who is lustful, who is penetrative, and who has at least a preference for women over men. The same themes are present in Ptolemy and Caelius Aurelianus. This shows that the archetype and disapproval for female homoeroticism displayed by authors such as Martial and Lucian was cultural and not solely a function of literature.

Though these women may have been used as a light-hearted form of humor, this was only made possible by the deeply engrained disdain for female homoeroticism (and more especially active, penetrative women) in the Roman Empire

The Question of Cunnilingus

As I have previously suggested, the practice of cunnilingus, whether it was performed by a male or female, provides somewhat of a problem in classifying sexuality within the Roman model. It is unquestionable that the Romans had a very negative view of those who performed

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oral sex (whether fellatio or cunnilingus), considering it to be a specifically dirty act.69 The problem comes in defining activity and passivity in oral sex. In our culture, we typically think of a person giving oral sex as being active (since they are performing the action), and the person receiving oral sex as the passive partner. Strictly speaking, this is not how the Romans thought.

For them, activity meant masculinity and passivity meant femininity, and since it was certainly not masculine to defile your mouth with the genitals of another, performing oral sex could not be seen as active. Rather, Parker and Williams agree that fellatio, at least, was seen as a man actively penetrating the mouth of his partner.70 Parker draws an equivalence between fellatio and cunnilingus, saying “for a man to give oral sex is for him to be passive with respect to his mouth, and the disgrace is the same whether he is servicing a man or a woman.”71 Williams, however, goes beyond this, suggesting that the stigma was even greater for cunnilingus than it was for fellatio,72 and offering the following explanation:

Cunnilingi befouled [men’s] mouths and subjugated themselves to another just as did those who performed fellatio, but whereas in an act of fellatio there was at least one man doing what he ought to do (dominating another with his phallus, which was being given the respect it deserved), in an act of cunnilinctus the phallus was extraneous, and it was a woman’s sexual organ that was the focus of attention.73

This, I think, partially explains why cunnilingus in particular is so difficult for the Romans to classify. Not only is there no phallus involved in the act—making it contrary to the typical

69 Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 218-9.
70 Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” 53 and Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 218.
71 Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” 52.
72 Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 220.
73 Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 223.

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Roman classification for sex acts—but it focuses solely on female pleasure, which is usually secondary to male pleasure, or at least on the same level as it.

Defining a giver of oral sex as the passive partner, though allowing us (and the Romans) to fit oral sex more easily into the Roman model of sexuality, is somewhat over-simplifying the issue. Parker remarks on this problem, saying:

First, while the anus and vagina are thought of primarily as passive (mere receptacles for action), the mouth is problematic, a difficulty of conceptualization again shown in the language itself. Passive oral sex (irrumari) has the active counterpart of sucking (fellare, Adams 1982: 130-34). Thus, for the Romans, oral intercourse crosses classificatory boundaries. Disturbingly, it is both active and
passive. Oral sex, however greatly desired, is already constructed as an anomalous activity.74

Thus the Roman view of oral sex is not only incredibly negative, but also somewhat confused. They must reconcile, within their model of activity and passivity, the idea that a person must be passive if they are being penetrated in any way, with the fact that the person being penetrated here is also the one performing action. The Romans seem to alleviate this confusion with pure mockery for any man who chooses to perform oral sex on a person of any gender. If he has any amount of activity in the matter, it only makes his actions more deplorable, because he is actively choosing this shameful and passive form of sex.

Unfortunately, there is not enough evidence of cunnilingus in female homoerotic relationships to judge whether its portrayal differs significantly from a man’s performance of cunnilingus. We cannot know, therefore, whether it was more accepted for a woman to perform cunnilingus than a man, since this woman would be taking on a passive role, as she is supposed

74 Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” 50.

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to. There is some evidence to suggest, though, that this is not the case. In book two of his Satires, Juvenal condemns effeminate men through his character Laronia, having her say “There will not be any example in our sex so detestable. Media does not lick Cluvia nor Flora Catulla. Hipso submits to young men and grows pale with disease both ways” (non erit ullum / exemplum in nostro tam detestabile sexu. / Media non lambit Cluviam nec Flora Catullam: / Hispo subit iuvenes et morbo pallet utroque).75 Laronia, here, is specifically condemning the act of same-sex oral intercourse, saying that men fellate each other, whereas women do not “lick” each other. It is unlikely that she is wholly correct in this assertion, considering that oral sex was somewhat widely performed and discussed, and that one of the very few artistic depictions of female/female sex that we have from the Roman Empire includes a woman performing oral sex on another woman.76 Rather, what we can ascertain from this source is that it was indeed stigmatized for women to perform cunnilingus. It is a point of pride for Laronia that women do not commit this action: that they do not sink so low as to perform oral sex on a member of their own gender, as men do.

Quite interestingly, Laronia is not only speaking against cunnilingus, but suggesting that a woman who performs cunnilingus is masculine and therefore active. In this discussion, she is specifically speaking about the maintenance of appropriate gender roles. She mentions that some few women may enjoy wrestling and meat-eating, but the men whom she is speaking to weave wool^77 more nimbly than Arachne, “the kind of thing that the horrid concubine does as she sits on the block” (horrida quale facit residens in codice paelex).78 Her conversation about oral sex is

75 Juvenal, Satura 2.47-50.
76 John R. Clarke and Michael Larvey, Roman Sex, 130-132.
77 A traditional job for the women of a household.
78 Juvenal, Satura 2.57. Laronia’s imagery here is unclear. Edward U. Courtney, Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (London: The Athlone Press, 2013), 109 notes that in Roman society, female slaves were often made the and the matron of the house would sometimes punish the slaves for this. Courtney claims that the codex (block) here is “corresponding to a ball and chain.” He also notes that “the point of the line is obscure; the wording does not suggest, as the context demands, delicate work, and seems rather to lessen than to emphasize the effeminacy of the men.”

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an analogy between two gender-deviant acts: cunnilingus, which women (to their credit) do not perform, and fellatio, which men do perform. If she did not consider cunnilingus to be an act that defies gender roles, it would have no place in this conversation. Since a woman is supposed to be passive, and she is using women not performing cunnilingus as a comparison to men who do perform fellatio, then it stands to reason that she sees the former as women being active. The other evidence that it is not socially appropriate for women to perform cunnilingus is Martial 7.67, which I have already explored. In this epigram, Martial mocks Philaenis for both her masculinity and her performance of cunnilingus, with the punch line of the poem being that, though she tries to make herself masculine and therefore refuses to fellate, she ultimately (and unwittingly) makes herself passive through her performance of cunnilingus. In his discussion on oral sex, Parker analyzes Philaenis, saying “In her twisted logic, says Martial, this leaves only tribadism (a parody of vaginal intercourse), attempts at anal violation of boys, and oral sex, cunnilingus. What Philaenis fails to realize is that cunnilingus is equally passive, equally an act of being penetrated.”79 Though I think Parker has the right idea here, I would disagree with his assertion that cunnilingus is “equally passive.” Rather, I think it has been shown to be simultaneously active and passive, at least when it is performed by women. Both Laronia and Philaenis find some amount of masculinity and activity in the act, and though Philaenis is mocked for this conclusion, she had to have gotten the idea from somewhere. The fact that the women receiving cunnilingus from other women are not given any extended consideration in these texts, and that passive women in homoerotic relationships are never talked about in detail mistresses of their owners,

79 Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” 52-3.

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without even more detail about their active lovers, suggests that the woman receiving cunnilingus is not, strictly speaking, the active partner. This has to mean that the woman giving cunnilingus is not entirely the passive partner. Rather, female homoeroticism when it includes cunnilingus does not fit into a phallocentric model. The dichotomy between active and passive becomes more fluid in this particular sex act, troubling the Roman model of sex.

The Shame of the Passive Partner

Part of the Roman model of sexuality, or at least how we currently interpret that model, is that only a person acting outside of his or her gender role in a sexual relationship should be stigmatized. Thus a man fucking another man is not stigmatized, because he is still the active
partner. The gender of the person whom he is fucking does not matter to his morality or social status. If there is any animosity towards him at all, it is because he is enabling a Roman man to be effeminate, but even this judgment is rare. It stands to reason, then, that women who are the passive partners of tribades should not be stigmatized, since they are performing the role appropriate to their gender. This, however, is not always the case. Instead, there are several instances of female homoerotic relationships being especially shameful for everyone involved, and the passive lovers themselves expressing shame within their narrative.
The first instance of female homoeroticism being especially shameful is in Seneca the Elder’s Controversies. I have already examined briefly the active partner in this scene, but it is the husband’s reaction that I am interested in now. Though we never get to hear the perspective of the wife who was being fucked by a tribas, we can see through her husband that she was performing a socially unacceptable action, even beyond adultery. When he first walks in to see two tribades (one of whom was his wife) on his bed, he must examine his wife’s lover to

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determine her sex. The text describes this as a “shameful investigation” (inhonesta inquisitio),80 and Swancutt elaborates on this by saying, “In fact, the tribas triply emasculated the husband. Not only did a demi-man bed his wife, but the husband had to inspect the tribas to see whether h/e was hermaphroditic and then he had to report his findings to other men—not a good day at all for the husband!”81 If this was a male adulterer, the husband would have only been emasculated due to his wife being bedded by another man, but extra shame is added to him due to the fact that the penetrator was a woman. If the relationship between these two women truly followed the Roman system of activity/passivity, the experience for the husband and wife should not have been any different than with a male adulterer: only the active tribas should experience the shame and stigma of committing a strange sex act, because she is the only one defying her gender role.

That is, however, not the case. The husband is especially shamed by the gender of his wife’s adulterer. Because his shame comes from the action of his wife and not by any cause of his own, we must assume that the wife, the true culprit, also experiences this shame. Like the stigma of her husband, the stigma of the wife is twofold: she not only committed adultery—a shameful act in itself—she committed adultery with another woman. While her shame seemingly derives from the dishonor which she brought to her husband, it is worsened by the gender of her partner, even though she herself is still performing her proper gender role. If activity and passivity were the only defining factors in female homoerotic relationships, neither she nor her husband would experience this added shame.

80 Seneca the Elder, Controversiae, 1.2.23.
81 Swancutt, “Still Before Sexuality,” 52.

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The context of this account in Seneca’s Controversies is a discussion of the morality and legality of killing an adulterer. The characters bring this specific case up as an example of a time when it is appropriate to kill the adulterer, versus if the husband had caught his wife with a man, in which case he should not be allowed to kill that man. The character Grandaus says: “For that reason they would not allow [a man] to kill an adulterer”; then “But if I had caught a pseudomale adulterer . . .” (‘non ideo occidi adulteros [non] paterentur,’ dixit: εἰ δὲ φηλάρρενα μοιχὸν ἔλαβον).82 This once again shows that there is more to female homoerotic relationships than activity versus passivity. The debaters create a clear difference from a wife who is adulterated by a man and a wife who is adulterated by a woman. Thus, even though this relationship follows the phallocentric model in that it has a clearly active and clearly passive partner, it is not only the active partner—the woman defying her gender role—who is treated as a deviant. Her passive lover is shamed for her actions through the shame of her husband, and both her and her lover are killed for their affair—made morally sound only by the fact that her lover was a female instead of a male.

Perhaps the most obvious expression of shame from a passive female partner in a homoerotic relationship comes from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans. The layout of the story enables Leaena’s expression of shame more than most other accounts of female homoeroticism, because she herself, as a passive partner, is recounting the story and can thus include her own feelings. As such, she not only expresses confusion over Megilla’s character, but expresses shame in her own role in the relationship. When her fellow courtesan Clonarium asks if it is true that a female has taken her as lover, Leaena responds “It is true, O Clonarium,

82 Seneca the Elder, Controversiae, 1.2.23.

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but I am ashamed, for it is strange”83 (Ἀληθῆ, ὦ Κλωνάριον· αἰσχύνομαι δέ,  λλόκοτον γάρ τίἐστι).84 The dialogue ends with Clonarium asking for details on how Megilla fucked Leaena, but Leaena refuses to give these details, saying that they are “causing shame” (αἰσχρά). It is possible that Lucian leaves these details out simply because he himself does not know how women have sex with each other. Haley presents this option when she asks, “How much did Lucian know? We cannot escape the fact that this is a man in a male-dominated and male-oriented culture writing about women loving other women.”85 Regardless of his motive for not including details, however, it is still significant that he justifies this exclusion with Leaena’s shame. If this were a male homoerotic relationship, the active partner would have absolutely no reason to be ashamed of his relationship. He is behaving in the way that he should be by being active and penetrative, and so the gender of his lover is insignificant. This does not seem to be the case with Leaena and Megilla.

In the Roman model of sexuality, Megilla should clearly be stigmatized. She is a woman, meant by nature to be passive in sex, but she is defying this role by behaving in a masculine way and penetrating other women. Leaena, however, is a completely passive partner. There is nothing in the passage to suggest that she is at all active in the relationship, and is clearly the penetrated partner.

All of the action—the kissing, the groping, and (presumably) the penetration—happens to Leaena, and not by her. Indeed, Megilla even courts her like a man would court a woman, giving her a necklace and a dress.86 Since she is performing her gender role correctly, then, she should not be criticized within what we think is the Roman model. And yet she feels shame for her actions, for the unusual relationship that she is a part of. Her feelings of shame should confuse how we view

83 This is a somewhat conservative translation, given that the word can also mean ‘monstrous.’
84 Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans 5.1.
85 Shelley P. Haley, “Lucian’s ‘Leaena and Clonarium’: Voyeurism or a Challenge to Assumptions?,” in Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, ed. Nancy S. Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002) 299.
86 Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans 5.4.

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Roman sexuality, for within our current model, she has no reason to feel ashamed. This story, then, is either an anomaly, or else it is evidence that the Roman model of sexuality which we currently accept is not applicable to female same-sex relationships.

Though she does not express shame at any point, Demonassa’s character also confuses the Roman model of sex, in that she is shown being both active and passive. Though she is not given much attention in the dialogue—typical of a passive partner—Megilla describes Demonassa as her wife (καὶ ἔστιν ἐμὴ γυνή).87 Leaena then asks: “and you even have that thing of a man and you do to Demonassa the very things that men do?” (καὶ τὸ  νδρεῖον ἐκεῖνο ἔχεις καὶ ποιεῖς τὴν Δημώνασσαν ἅπερ οἱ ἄνδρες;).88 Though Megilla denies that she has a penis, the very question implies an understanding that Demonassa is the passive partner in her relationship with Megilla. Demonassa’s relationship with Megilla, then, like Leaena’s, fits the dichotomy of phallocentricism.

Each pairing has one active partner who is masculine, and one passive partner who is feminine.  Demonassa, though, is not solely feminine, nor is she solely passive. Indeed, in her relationship with Leaena, Demonassa takes an active role. Leaena states that both Megilla and Demonass kissed her “just as men” (ὥσπερ οἱ ἄνδρες), and specifically notes Demonassa’s activity, saying “and Demonassa even bit me while kissing me” (ἡ Δημώνασσα δὲ καὶ ἔδακνε μεταξὺ καταφιλοῦσα). Demonassa, then, blurs the lines between active and passive, performing both roles. Rather than portraying Megilla as the sole active partner, Lucian chooses to include a character who disrupts the active/passive model. Though he may be doing this in order to intentionally make this account even stranger than it already would be with its discussion of

87 Ibid., 5.3.
88 Ibid.

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female homoeroticism, it is also possible that he is showing that female homoeroticism in general is in a realm outside of normal sexual classifications.

It is possible, though, that Leaena is wrong in her assumption that Demonassa plays the passive partner with Megilla, since Megilla neither confirms nor denies this point. Indeed, early on, Leaena describes Demonassa as “practicing the same craft” as Megilla (αὐτὴ καὶ ὁμότεχνος οὖσα τῇ Μεγίλλῃ) which very well could be an allusion to Demonassa’s sexual preferences. If this is the case, it is even more disturbing to the Roman phallocentric model than the idea that Demonassa could be a passive partner with Megilla, but an active partner with Leaena. If Demonassa also prefers activity, then the marriage between Demonassa and Megilla has two active partners, a concept unheard of in Roman sexuality. This does not mean, though, that it is an unreasonable assumption. I will show in my next section several examples of reciprocity in female homoerotic relationships that show that female-female relationships did not always follow the active/passive model.

Though I have already discussed the shame and negativity that Iphis expresses in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I did so previously with the assumption that Iphis, as someone raised as a boy and expected to play a man’s role in her marriage with Ianthe, is the masculine and active partner. While this assumption is not, strictly speaking, incorrect, there are several lines in the poem that suggest her femininity and passivity. I argue, therefore, that Iphis is an androgynous figure, both masculine/active and feminine/passive, and further that her shame does not come from her defiance of gender roles, but from her homoerotic attraction.

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The first evidence of Iphis’s androgyny comes from her very name, in which her mother rejoiced “because it was common,89 and with it she would not deceive anyone”90 (quod commune foret, nec quemquam falleret illo).91 Shortly after, Ovid writes: “Her style of dress was that of a boy; her face – whether you were to give it to a boy or a girl, each had been beautiful (cultus erat pueri; facies, quam sive puellae, / sive dares puero, fuerat formosus uterque).92 Her gender, then, cannot be determined by her face, but is beautiful regardless. In addition to this, though her father thinks she is a boy, he promises to betroth her at thirteen years old,93 an age more typical for marriage of girls than boys.94 She is masculine enough to convince everyone around her, including her own father and her bride-to-be, that she is a man, and therefore must have some masculine traits. Yet when she is ultimately transformed into a man, Ovid describes her in the following way:

Sequitur comes Iphis euntem,
quam solita est, maiore gradu, nec candor in ore
permanet, et vires augentur, et acrior ipse est
vultus, et incomptis brevior mensura capillis,
plusque vigoris adest, habuit quam femina. Nam quae
femina nuper eras, puer es! 95

And the companion Iphis follows her as she goes, with a greater step than she was accustomed to, and fairness does not persist on her face, and her strength increases, and her face itself is sharper, and the measure of her disheveled hair is shorter, and more of vigor is present than she had as a girl. For you who were recently a girl, are a boy!

89 Not referring to its frequency of use, but to the fact that it is a name that can be used for any gender.
90 Meaning that she could openly use the name without having to resort to deceit.
91 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.710.
92 Ibid., 9.712-3.
93 Ibid., 9.714.
94 Diane T. Pintabone, “Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe,” 276.
95 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.786-91.

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So even though she is originally masculine enough to fool those around her, she must not be entirely masculine, because she gains more masculine traits when Isis transforms her into a boy. She has spent the first thirteen years of her life in a state of androgyny, but rather than not passing as either male or female, she plays well the role of both. The ability to be an active sexual partner seems to be the only thing that Iphis is lacking for her portrayal of either gender in her erotic longing for Ianthe, something that she is both aware of and devastated by. Iphis’s greatest wish is to be able to wed Ianthe and consummate their marriage. She does not care how this is done, but is convinced that an active partner—specifically one with a penis—is required. Though she, in many ways, is the man in their relationship, she is indifferent to which of them is the phallicized and thus active partner. She states in her lament:

huc licet ex toto sollertia confluat orbe,
ipse licet revolet ceratis Daedalus alis,
quid faciet? num me puerum de virgine doctis
artibus efficiet? num te mutabit, Ianthe?96

Should ingenuity from the whole world meet here, should Daedelus himself fly back with his waxed wings, what would he do? For with his learned arts will he make me a boy from a maiden? For will he change you, Ianthe?

Iphis here expresses a complete indifference towards which one of them becomes anatomically male, as long as they are able to have sex. She herself displays here that she has no preference towards passivity or activity, expressing both options equally.

To review, Iphis, by loving Ianthe, has the desire of a man. By not actively pursuing Ianthe, she has the behavior of a woman. She has no preference for either activity or passivity, so long as she is able to have sex with the object of her desire. She is androgynous in her physical

96 Ovid, “Metamorphoses,” 9.741-4.

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appearance: able to convince others that she is either a girl or a boy. She is masculine enough to convince others that she is male, but she lacks the walk, strength, hair, and color of a man. Her father thinks that she is male, but still promises to betroth her at an age more appropriate for girls. Iphis, then, is truly androgynous, playing simultaneously a feminine (passive) role and masculine (active) role.

Though Iphis’s androgyny is significant in itself, it also means that when Iphis is expressing her shame and negativity toward her desires for another woman, she is doing so partially as a passive partner. In addition to this, she is shamed not by her transgression of gendernorms, but instead by her same-sex desire. Pintabone compares Iphis to other desiring women in Metamorphoses, remarking on the rarity of a positive outcome for these women (in contrast to Iphis, who through her transformation is enabled to marry the woman she loves). She explains this contrast by saying that Iphis “differs greatly from these other women who express sexual desire because Iphis simply does nothing. Unlike Byblis,97 Iphis does not talk herself into pursuing her love, into acting on her desire. Passive, she ultimately leaves the whole matter to her mother and to the goddess Isis.”98 Because she is not “acting on her desire,” then, and because she has no means of being sexually active, Iphis is passive in her relationship with Ianthe.99 Therefore, when she calls her love “monstrous” (prodigiosa) and “known by nobody” (cognita nulli),100 she is not referring to her putatively unnatural desire to be active or penetrative, but instead to the fact that

97 In the story directly preceding that of Iphis, Byblis falls in love with her brother, actively pursues him, and after he runs away to escape her, she dies in pursuit of him and is turned into a fountain.
98 Pintabone, “Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe,” 274-5.
99 It is worth noting that Ianthe is also passive, and so there are two passive partners in this relationship. This is only somewhat significant, however, since Ovid depicts this as an impossible relationship, and the lovers are not truly together until one of them is made active.
100 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.727.

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she, a woman, is attracted to another woman. This point is emphasized by her comparison of her own sexual desire to that of animals in the natural world:

nec vaccam vaccae, nec equas amor urit equarum:
urit oves aries, sequitur sua femina cervum.
sic et aves coeunt, interque animalia cuncta
femina femineo conrepta cupidine nulla est.101

Love does not inflame a cow for a cow, nor mares for mares: love inflames rams for sheep, his own doe follows the stag. Thus also the birds come together, and among all animals no female has been seized by lust for a female.

The animal world, like Iphis, has no standard of gender or how it relates to activity or passivity. Rather in Iphis’s mind, it is not a social standard but nature itself that dictates their sexual activity, and thus should dictate hers as well. She is distraught and ashamed because she believes that her love defies natural law, and is therefore monstrous. In fact, she is more upset that she is unable to properly defy her gender roles and make herself an active partner. One could argue that she does not see feminine roles as being her gender (since she was raised as a boy), and therefore does not think that being an active partner would be a defiance. This, however, is made unlikely by Iphis saying later: “see what you were born, unless you also deceive yourself, and seek what is right, and love that which you should as a woman” (quid sis nata, vide, nisi te quoque decipis ipsam,/ et pete quod fas est, et ama quod femina debes!).102 Iphis identifies herself as a woman: she has not “deceived herself” about her gender identity. She should not, then, yearn to be active, and if she is to express any shame at all within the Roman model of sexuality, it should be for her masculinity and desire to be active, and not for simply being attracted to a woman.

101 Ibid., 9.731-734.
102 Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.747-8.

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Reciprocity and Sexual Equality in Female Homoeroticism

While most depictions of female homoeroticism include a clearly active/penetrative partner and a clearly passive/penetrated partner, fitting into the Roman phallocentric model, there are several depictions with language that hints at a sexual reciprocity between the partners. This is a highly unusual way to show sex within a phallocentric model, where the language most frequently shows activity. Often (but not always) these depictions of reciprocity are subtle, and are built into an active/passive relationship. Take, for example, the text by Seneca the Elder that I previously examined. In this passage, there is clearly an active penetrator and a passive penetrated partner, seemingly fitting a phallocentric model of activity and passivity. Seneca, however, uses the term tribades to describe both women,103 subtly equating them for their shared same-sex experience. This is significant, considering that the words in Parker’s grid that describe certain kinds of sex are never the same for the active and passive partners.104 This reciprocity is evidence that female homoeroticism does not fit the Roman model of sex as we currently see it.

Although most depictions of tribades are hyper-masculine and penetrative, the very word comes from the Greek word meaning “to rub,” suggesting that the Romans did indeed conceive of a kind of sex which did not include penetration. Swancutt claims that “it appears that the Romans did not take the figure of the tribas over from the Greeks, but invented the tribas whole cloth as a ‘gender-monstrous Greek penetrator’ from the Greek verb tribein, which merely means ‘to rub.’”105 If her claim is correct, though, then why did the Romans choose a Greek word that implied a kind of sex-act separate from penetration? Rather, I suggest that female

103 Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 1.2.23.
104 Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” 49.
105 Diana M. Swancutt, “Still Before Sexuality,” 56.

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homoeroticism, while having aspects of masculinity and penetration, falls outside of a phallocentric, penetrative model.

Once again, I turn to the story of Iphis and Ianthe, this time to show the equality between the two characters. Unlike a typical Roman relationship, where one partner holds more power than the other, Iphis and Ianthe are depicted as being equals. Pintabone states the following about the issue of reciprocity: “The love of Iphis and Ianthe is characterized by mutuality and equality, two ingredients normally lacking in most of the heteroerotic stories Ovid relates, and more importantly, lacking in the Roman sexual ideology, which establishes a hierarchy of sexual activity (penetrator) over passivity (penetrated).”106 Her theory of mutuality and equality is evidenced by the following passage:

par aetas, par forma fuit, primasque magistris
accepere artes, elementa aetatis, ab isdem.
hinc amor ambarum tetigit rude pectus, et aequum
vulnus utrique dedit, sed erat fiducia dispar.107

She was equal in age, equal in form, and from the same teachers they received their first arts, the basic principles of their age. Hence love touched the young heart of both, and gave both an equal wound, but the confidence was unequal.

Though Iphis and Ianthe do not have a reciprocal sexual relationship (because they have no sexual relationship at all), they have a completely equal relationship in every other way. Neither one of them holds power over the other, and other than Iphis’s anxiety about her gender problem, they are both equally happy to be wed. The emphasis that Ovid places on their equality overturns the normal hierarchy that exists in the Roman model of sexuality.

106 Pintabone, “Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe,” 179-180.
107 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.718-21.

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I turn now to Martial 1.90, his epigram about Bassa. Once again, Bassa is clearly an active and penetrative woman, with her “monstrous Venus” that “feigns a man” (Mentiturque virum prodigiosa Venus),108 but Martial also says to her: “You dare to mutually join together twin cunts” (Inter se geminos audes committere cunnos).109 It is possible that Martial is simply speaking figuratively, and that Bassa and her lovers are not actually touching vulvas. His use of the phrase inter se, however, suggests that whatever they are doing, they are actively doing it together. It is worth noting, too, that Bassa is unlike the other penetrative women whom we have seen, in that she does not have any outwardly masculine characteristics other than her lust and sexual activity. She is so feminine, in fact, that Martial originally assumed that she was an I ncredibly chaste woman, and did not suspect her of tribadism. Her femininity, then, may supply further evidence of her willingness for a reciprocal homoerotic relationship.

The Lucianic Erotes also conflates a depiction of penetrative women with language of reciprocity. Though Charicles speaks of women who have “strapped onto themselves objects made by handiwork of licentious organs” (ἀσελγῶν δὲ ὀργάνων ὑποζυγωσάμεναι τέχνασμα),110 he also says, “Hereafter let women also love each other” (πρὸς τὸ λοιπὸν ἐράτωσαν ἀλλήλων καὶ γυναῖκες).111 The implied reciprocity here is, admittedly, somewhat lessened by the fact that Charicles is comparing these relationships to those of men, which do follow the active/passive model and do not have reciprocity. Still, it is worth noting the use of the word ἀλλήλων (each other), which implies an equality in the proposed relationship.

108 Martial, Epigrams 1.90.
109 Ibid.
110 Lucian, Erotes 28.
111 Ibid.

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The last text that implies sexual reciprocity between women is one that has no clear active or passive partner. The account was written by Juvenal in his Satires, and is about two women who defile the altar of Chastity:

i nunc et dubita qua sorbeat aera sanna
Tullia, quid dicat notae collactea Maurae,
Maura Pudicitiae veterem cum praeterit aram,
noctibus hic ponunt lecticas, micturiunt hic
effigiemque deae longis siphonibus implent
inque vices equitant ac nullo teste moventur.112

Go now and consider how Tullia sucks in air with a sneer, what the foster-sister of famous Maura says, when Maura passes by the long-standing altar of Chastity, they place their litters here in the nights, here they have to urinate and they fill up the
image of the goddess with long jets and in turns they ride [each other] and they move with no witness.

Rather than have one active partner and one passive partner, these women both perform both roles. There is still an implication of penetration in that they are “riding” (equitant)113 each other, but they “take it in turns” (in vices), each alternating between the active gender-defiant role and the passive gender-appropriate role. Not only does this disrupt a phallocentric model according to which one’s status is based on whether one is an active or passive partner, but it shows that this kind of relationship was possible in the minds of the Romans, opening up similar possibilities for other texts. Do we finally have a hint as to how Demonassa can be the “wife” of a female lover and still engage actively in sexual relations? Could she, too, be like these women? We cannot say for certain, but we know from this passage that the idea is at the very least not unthinkable within Roman culture.

112 Juvenal, Satura 6.306-11.
113 The verb equito is commonly used in the context of sex in Latin literature, and implies an active/passive relationship where one partner is the ‘horse’ and the other is the ‘rider.’ For more information on the usage of the word equito, see J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 166.

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Allusions to Female Homoeroticism in Heterosexual Relationships

As we have seen, female homoeroticism blurs the lines between masculinity and femininity, between activity and passivity. This is further shown in two passages that allude to female homoeroticism in their depiction of a female who actively pursues a (most likely passive) male. The first of these is by Ovid, in which he writes a letter from the perspective of Sappho to her boy lover Phaon. Sappho is obviously not known for her love of men, a fact that Ovid does not ignore in this letter:

nec me Pyrrhiades Methymniadesve puellae,
nec me Lesbiadum cetera turba iuvant.
vilis Anactorie, vilis mihi candida Cydro;
non oculis grata est Atthis, ut ante, meis,
atque aliae centum, quas hic sine crimine amavi;114
inprobe, multarum quod fuit, unus habes.115

Neither the girls of Pyrrha nor the ones of Methymna, nor the remaining crowd of Lesbian women delight me. Anactorie is worthless, fair Cydro is worthless to me; Atthis is not pleasing to my eyes, as before, nor the hundred other girls, whom I
loved here without censure; Cruel one, [the love] which was for many girls, you alone have.

Ovid, then, is framing Sappho’s love for Phaon against the background of her previous love for girls, reminding his audience that this particular desire breaks the norm for her. Indeed, Sappho does not love Phaon at the same time as she desires women, but instead rejects her desire for

114 This is a variant on the more common reading: “quas non sine crimine amavi,” meaning “whom I loved not without censure.” Ovid also writes in line 201: “Lesbians, you who made me disgraceful by love” (Lesbides,
infamem quae me fecistis amatae), making this variant unlikely. If the majority reading is correct, then note the negativity in Sappho’s language about her affairs with women. Ovid suggests that she faces social stigma for her homoeroticism. There is, however, no text contemporary with Sappho that suggests that she faced censure for her relationships, and this could be Ovid projecting the views of the Roman world on an author that was writing some 600 years before his time.

115 Ovid., Heroides 15.15-9.

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women in her pursuit of the young man. In Ovid’s mind, though, she has maintained her homoerotic tendencies: she is still the active pursuer of her lover, even if her lover is male.116 Gordon explores the ways in which Ovid makes Sappho a masculine and active figure. She sums up her argument, saying: “Sappho’s repeated references to Phaon’s good looks, her allusions to her long history of sexual exploits, her bold descriptions of lovemaking, and her acceptance of the notion that to rape is to flatter are among the subtler aspects of Sappho’s machismo. Ovid’s Sappho is so masculine that when she chooses a man, she chooses a boy.”117 She ultimately fails in her activity, however, because after a seemingly loving relationship with Phaon, he leaves her.  Distraught by her spurned love, she plots her own death, planning to throw herself from the Leucadian cliffs.118

Like many of the texts that we have seen, this representation of Sappho is filled with confusion over gender roles and sexual activity. Sappho, known for her love of women, falls in love with a boy whom she actively but ineffectively pursues. Her relationship with him resembles that of a Greek pederastic relationship, with the obvious major difference that Sappho is a woman, not meant by nature to actively pursue anyone. She defies her gender role first by having sex with women, and later by attempting to be the active partner in a relationship with a male. Her heterosexual relationship is framed by her homoerotic tendencies, confusing the Roman model of sex even more so than a tribas who fucks women: In this relationship, no one is performing the appropriate gender role. Sappho, a female, is the active partner, while Phaon, a male, is the passive

116 It is important to note that the activity of Sappho in regards to both the maidens and Phaon in this poem is seemingly an invention of Ovid. Sappho’s poetry, though showing an amount of active desire, is filled with language of reciprocity. For evidence of this, see Pamela Gordon, “Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15,” 290n9.
117 Pamela Gordon, “The Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15,” 284.
118 Ovid, Heroides 15.171-182.

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partner. Once again then, Ovid uses a female homoerotic figure to blur the lines of gender and sexuality roles.

The second heterosexual but gender-deviant text is a fictional letter written by Alciphron, portraying a girl named Glaucippe writing a letter to her mother. In the letter, Glaucippe writes that she no longer wants to marry the man to whom she is promised, but rather has fallen in love with a man whom she first saw dressed as a woman at the Oschophoria festival.119 She writes to her mother: “Either I will mingle with this man, or having mimicked the Lesbian Sappho, not from the rocks of Leucadia, but from the jutting rocks of the Peiraeus I will throw myself into the wave.” (ἢ τούτῳ μιγήσομαι ἢ τὴν Λεσβίαν μιμησαμένη Σαπφὼ οὐκ ἀπὸ τῆς Λευκάδος πέτρας, ἀλλ᾿ ἀπὸ τῶν Πειραϊκῶν προβόλων ἐμαυτὴν εἰς τὸ κλυδώνιον ὤσω).120 The reference to Sappho, a woman notorious for her love of women, combined with the fact that the boy was cross-dressing when Glaucippe first saw him, is clearly reminiscent of female homoerotism. Further, Glaucippe seems to be taking an active, desiring role in this text. She states that she “will mingle with this man,” defying her duty as a woman to marry the man whom she is betrothed to, and instead actively pursuing a different man. In the next letter, her mother responds “that which is right for a girl to be ashamed, you have shaved off the modesty from your countenance” (δέον αἰσχύνεσθαι κορικῶς, πέξεσας τὴν αἰδῶ τοῦ προσώπου).121 Her mother, then, sees her pursuit as unfeminine and immodest.

119 Alciphron, Letters of Fishermen 11.1-3. In their notes to their translation of this text, Benner and Fobes explain this festival, saying “In this festival there was a procession headed by two young Athenians of distinguished family, wearing women’s dress and carrying ὠσχοί (vine-branches loaded with grapes). The Letters of Alciphron Aelian, and Philostratus, trans. A.R. Benner and F.H. Fobes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 62.
120 Alciphron, Letters of Fishermen 11.4.
121 Ibid., 12.2.

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Though the letter of Glaucippe shows a yearning for a heterosexual relationship, there are clear allusions to female homoeroticism, and this can help to inform us on views of women in same-sex relationships. Like tribades, Glaucippe disregards her passivity and modesty in active pursuit of a partner. She blurs the lines of gender, and the reader has to wonder how this relationship will work if it comes to pass. Will Glaucippe resume a passive role once she has reached her goal? Will she be happy to be dominated, as long as it is by the man of her choice? If these things are true, then why is she more attracted to a man who is depicted as being feminine (and is indeed dressed as a woman), and why does she choose to compare herself to a Sappho who takes an active role in her relationship with a boy? While there are no obvious answers to any of these questions, the fact that the letters allow us to ask them is significant. Like so many of the texts that clearly depict female homoerotic relationships, this text troubles the concept of appropriate gender roles and questions what it means to be an active female.

Conclusion

The current studies of Roman sexuality revolve around two main points: firstly, that the Romans always thought of sex in a phallocentric way, with the penetrator being the masculine/active partner and the penetrated being the feminine/passive partner, and secondly that only those who deviated from their ascribed gender roles were culturally stigmatized. Though these guidelines apply nicely to heteroerotic partners and male homoerotic partners, the Roman depiction of female homoeroticism often deviates from these norms. While penetration is almost always shown, even in female homoerotic relationships, it does not always preclude a single active partner, and indeed there are several texts that show varying amounts of reciprocity within these relationships. In addition to this, female homoeroticism is nearly universally chastised, and while

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the penetrative/masculine partner is usually given the most negative attention, several texts admonish both the active and passive partners, and show the passive partner as deeply shameful of her homoerotic relationship.

Despite the fact that much of the current academic discourse concerning Roman female homoeroticism centers on this same model of sexuality, the Romans did not depict female homoeroticism in the same ways that they did male homoeroticism. There are several pieces of textual evidence that suggest that those living during the Roman Empire, indeed, generally opposed any discourse which compared female and male homoeroticism. Though Charicles tries to treat male and female homoeroticism as parallels in the Lucianic Erotes, his opposition finds this point absurd, thinking that the two have nothing to do with each other. Iphis, too, is justified in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in basing her negativity towards her attraction to a woman on the absence of same-sex intercourse in the animal world, though this argument would not have worked for someone admonishing male homoeroticism. In all of the texts that I have examined, there are only three which compare male and female homoeroticism: Plato’s Laws, the Lucianic Erotes, and Soranus’s On Chronic Disease. While Plato exists well before the Roman Empire and does not, therefore, fit this particular discussion, the latter of the two texts only compare female and male homoeroticism as a way of admonishing male homoeroticism. Seemingly, then, the only justification in the Roman mind for a comparison between male and female homoeroticism is as a rhetorical technique in emphasizing how unnatural and disgusting male homoeroticism is. It is therefore anachronistic for modern scholars to analyze male and female homoeroticism in the Roman Empire in the same ways and by the same guidelines.

Brooten says the following about the asymmetry of sexual classification:

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But in spite of the presence of sexual love between women in Roman society, Plautus, Ovid, Seneca the Elder, Phaedrus, Martial, and Juvenal represented it as distant from their society in one or more ways. In contrast, Roman authors displayed some tolerance toward those homoerotic males of their own society who played the active role, although they expressed considerable disdain toward passive citizen males, while expecting male slaves to endure penetration. This differing treatment of female and male homoeroticism is based upon a fundamental asymmetry between the feminine and masculine sexual roles of free persons that we can document throughout the Roman world and will see throughout this book: the permanent passivity expected of women contrasted with the understanding that free men might penetrate either females or males or even be penetrated themselves. This focus on penetration as the principal sexual image led to a simplistic view of female erotic behavior and a complex view of the erotic choices of free men.122

Though she makes an interesting point, I would question if this is the only possible explanation for the asymmetry. Rather, I think it is possible that the Romans knew very well that penetration was not the only means of sex (as evidenced by the meaning of the word tribas), but because of their discomfort with the idea that women can experience pleasure without a phallus involved, they phallicized homoerotic women (while still depicting them as transgressing the lines between activity and passivity) and depicted sex between women as unnatural and shameful, discouraging women from partaking of same-sex relationships. There is little, of course, to substantiate this theory, or any other theory about why the Romans were particularly negative toward female homoeroticism. It is only clear that this negativity was present, and that they showed female homoeroticism in a very different way than any other kind of sex.

There has been surprisingly little research done on female homoeroticism in any period of antiquity, though the field of study is certainly growing. Unfortunately, much of the research that has been done up to this point tries to force female homoeroticism into the Roman sexual model that we use to classify other kinds of relationships. This attempt is, at best, limiting, and at worst,

122 Brooten, Love Between Women, 56-7.

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completely inaccurate. Further research must be done on female homoerotic relationships in ancient literature and art, preferably with a more nuanced view on issues such as activity versus passivity and the transgressions of gender roles. Perhaps if we start to look at these relationships with a clean slate, resisting the urge to compare them with male homoeroticism, we can start to understand the motives behind the Roman’s denunciation of these practices, and evaluate why the female homoerotic relationship looks so different than every other kind of relationship in the Roman world.

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Haley, Shelley P. “Lucian’s ‘Leaena and Clonarium’: Voyeurism or a Challenge to Assumptions?” In Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, edited by Nancy S. Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger, 286-303. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Hallett, Judith P. “Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature.” In Roman Sexualities edited by J. P. Hallett and M.S. Skinner, 255-273. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Jope, James. “Interpretation and Authenticity of the Lucianic Erotes” in Helios 38.1 (2011): 103- 120.

König, Jason. Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005

Parker, Holt N. “The Teratogenic Grid.” In Roman Sexualities, edited by J. P. Hallett and M.S. Skinner, 47-65. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Pintabone, Diane T. “Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe: When Girls Won’t Be Girls.” In Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, edited by Nancy S. Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger, 256-285. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Swancutt, Diana M. “Still Before Sexuality: ‘Greek’ Androgyny, the Roman Imperial Politics of Masculinity and the Roman Invention of the Tribas.” In Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, edited by T. C. Penner and C. V. Stichele, 11-62. Ledin: Brill, 2007.

Williams, Craig A. Roman Homosexuality 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

20

“The Body in Question” by Grace Gillies (2019)

Medium. November 14, 2019. https://eidolon.pub/the-body-in-question-d28045d23714.

In high school and college, I used to spend summer days as one gender or the other. I was fascinated by my ability to “pass,” and to play with the nature of gender presentation. When I was male-passing, in my brother’s baggy old clothes and a baseball hat, I felt both attractive and pleasantly invisible on the city streets. I experimented with how frivolous a change I could make to tip my gendered balance one way or the other. I would be greeted with a confident “sir” at the local coffee shop — which would falter when I started speaking. My voice is girly.

But it wasn’t all fun and games. The biggest danger came from being “recognized” as a gender nonconforming woman. I faced harassment whether I looked like a woman or something else — men followed me, yelled at me, threw things at me, and worse — but there was an obvious difference in tone. Men who harrassed me while looked feminine wanted my attention.  Men who harassed me for being too masculine considered my very existence disruptive.   One time, a group of five men followed me for blocks, loudly debating two questions: whether they wanted to “fuck me” or not, and whether I was a man or a woman. It wasn’t the worst abuse I’ve ever received, but it was the most pointed: my gender confused them, and that made them angry.

By the time I moved to Rome in 2016 to teach at a Classics-focused study abroad program, I had grown out my hair, and regularly wore heels and makeup. Despite the extra work, pain, and money this presentation required, it felt easier. Still, I couldn’t shake an anxiety about my self-presentation. Gender can be a drag.

The focus of the program was on the material record of the Romans. We stared at shadows of ancient bodies over and over: their mirrors, their armor, their shackles, their bedrooms, their representations of themselves. Some of those representations came from the Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Massimo, which is home to an impressive collection of statues from the Roman world.

Our students were asked to consider the individuality of the statues. Many Roman statues are described as “copies” of Greek originals, but the collection emphasizes works as individual interpretations. The statues stand stripped of paint and their original context, pale under the spotlights against the stark grey walls. Placed side by side, it is easy to see small but weighty differences between them: the unique rolls of belly fat in a crouching Venus, the varied musculature of the Discoboulos. The effect is an unsettling conviction that these are real people.

Two examples of the Crouching Venus, PMT 154 and 155, discovered in Palermo and the Villa Adriana, now in the Palazzo Massimo, Rome (photo: Gillies 2017).

In one of the rooms lies a sleeping Hermaphroditus. The statue resists panoptic interpretation — the viewer may approach from all sides, but with only a limited view, in order to surprise the viewer as they walk around it. At the same time, Hermaphroditus lies naked and unconscious for the viewer to expose at will. The statue is a succinct commentary on sex, gender, and the presentation of bodies. It is also a joke.

Two perspectives on a sleeping Hermaphrodite, PMT 189, discovered in Rome, now in the Palazzo Massimo, Rome (photo: Gillies 2017).

John Berger has argued that looking is gendered, and that those assigned female at birth are conditioned to survey themselves at every second, in every context: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” He differentiates between “nakedness,” which is simply the state of having no clothes on, and “nudity,” which is the display of the undressed body. Men may be naked, but women are at most nude, since they are told to be constantly aware of how they look even when they are alone. As I looked at these statues, I became aware that I was looking at myself — how did I compare? Which one of these images was I? As viewer and viewed blurred, Hermaphroditus seemed an especially poignant example, since the figure is made nude over and over again, as the viewer approaches from different sides.

An advertisement for D’Amico foods in Rome, depicting a blindfolded nude woman being fed artichokes by (male) hands extending from behind the camera (photo: Gillies 2017).

Working in Italy provided its own pressures of viewership. The Italian staff at the program were always extremely kind, but the broader Italian attitude to gender and especially femininity seemed dauntingly conservative. When I arrived, Italy was in the throes of a campaign to increase the national birthrate by shaming (cisgender) women into giving birth. Directly outside the school, an ad for a food company showed a nude, blindfolded woman being held and fed by disembodied hands reaching out from behind the camera. Breathlessly, the woman awaits … pickled artichokes.

A joke. A succinct commentary on gender and the presentation of bodies.

As any beginner Latin or Greek student knows, all nouns have a gender. After that, it gets more complicated. The Greek and Roman canon both feature figures who switch from one gender to another, subvert gender roles, or otherwise refuse the gender binary. These characters’ genders are rarely unmarked and frequently problematized. During my research on Roman satire, I became steeped in invective against those who resist gender norms: tribades, women who act like men, especially by having sex with women; molles or effeminate men; and cinaedi, men who act effeminately and “passively” have sex with men.

During high school and college I had no real language for my gender experiments, but I recognize them now as early explorations of nonbinary gender identity. “Nonbinary” and “genderqueer” are flexible umbrella terms for gender identities outside of the Western binary of male and female. This can include transgender people, depending on how they define their own gender. Some people identify only as nonbinary or genderqueer, others as something more specific: blurring genders together, having more than one gender, inhabiting a third gender, or rejecting gender altogether.

As I looked at the statue of the sleeping Hermaphroditus, I was reminded of Lucian’s Dialogue of the Courtesans 5. In this dialogue, a sex worker Leaina explains to her curious friend Klonarion the details of her encounter with Megillos, who uses a masculine name and both feminine and masculine case endings (to respect this mixed usage but maintain clarity, I will use “they” to refer to Megillos). Although Megillos is never actually present, the mime reads like a striptease of them, slowly revealing the details of their body and desires. Leaina explains that she was hired by “Megilla” and Demonassa, to provide music for a drinking party. After the party, she winds up in bed with both of them (all translations my own):

LEAINA: Eventually Megilla, by now very hot, took off her wig, which fit very tightly and was very realistic, and was revealed to have hair cropped close to her skin, just like male athletes. I was shaken when I saw this. But Megilla said, “Leiana, have you ever seen such a beautiful young man?”

“But I don’t see any man here, Megilla,” I said.

“Don’t feminize me!” she said. “My name is Megillos, and I married this woman Demonassa a long time ago — she’s my wife.”

Central to the dialogue is the unsolvable riddle of Megillos’s body, a common theme for invective works written by men about women who have sex with women — how do they do it? Is she a man? Is she a woman? Is she a pickled artichoke?

Megillos’s insistence on aspects of both male and female genders, however, fits with a nonbinary gender identity. Leaina uses feminine endings to refer to Megillos, but Megillos refers to themself in both masculine and feminine terms, and more importantly refuses to resolve the tension this creates — they’re a “young man” (νεάνισκος) but not male, feminine but not a woman.

While I was teaching students to look at the ancient world, I was also teaching Medea to an intermediate Greek class. I had read the play and taught tragedy before, but the play began to take on a personal dimension. I pictured a Greek man playing a Greek woman who resents the values and body associated with being a Greek woman. “I’d rather fight behind a shield three times than give birth once,” Medea says to a crowd of Corinthian women, all men. At the end of the play, Medea has kept her word, killed her children, and surpassed all human boundaries. Victorious, she flies off in her grandfather’s fire chariot. My students and I discussed Froma Zeitlin’s classic interpretation of this finale: that Medea is so far beyond the gender binary that there is no place for her on earth. Megillos isn’t magic or tragic or even angry. So where do they belong?

Some of the students created a Greek-mythology themed roleplaying game, and earnestly suggested I would be a fitting Medea. I wrestled with this.

The mime of Megillos ends with one last clue about what Megillos’s body looks like, and how they act out their gender identity, and then one last denial of the juicy details:

LEAINA: “Give me what I want,” Megillos said, “if you don’t believe me, and you’ll see that I don’t fall short of any man — because I have something in place of what men have. Just let me, you’ll see.”

I gave in, Klonarion, because she was begging me so much, and offered me a necklace, the expensive kind, and very fine linen dresses. Then I embraced her like she was a man, and she went to work, and kissed me, and panted, and seemed to enjoy herself to the extreme.

KLONARION: What did she do, Leaina — or how did she do it? Please tell me that.

LEAINA: No, don’t ask me for the details, they’re shameful. By the goddess in heaven, I’d never talk about that.

Like Hermaphroditus, the dialogue is meant to be a joke. But the final note is shame — these acts, this gender, this body, is shameful. Shame is the most persistent theme of invective about genderqueer and nonbinary people. Shame was what people who yelled at me in the street were trying to inflict on me.

This is not to say that there are no examples of real gender non-conforming people from the ancient world who lived without shame. The Galli, for instance, were Roman priests of Cybele who castrated themselves and in many ways presented themselves as women. They have been interpreted as predecessors to transwomen, and although their office was highly regulated, they appear to have had a stable niche in Roman society. But in Roman literature, their gender is the result of—and intrinsically tied to—violence. At the end of Catullus’s story of Attis (poem 63), who castrates herself for Cybele in a frenzy, Attis uses feminine case endings but is filled with regret:

Am I to be called a maid of the gods, a female slave of Cybele?
Will I be a Maenad, a fragment of myself, a man unmanned …
Now at last I regret what I did, now at last I am ashamed.

In response, Cybele drives her mad. In 2017, gender dysphoria is still classified as a mental disorder. Experiences of violence, including sexual violence, and suicide rates are already disproportionately high amongst transgender and gender non-conforming people, and only increasing. These are hard statistics, with a long history.

In the center of the second floor at the Palazzo Massimo are two statues of Apollo and Dionysus. They are both shown as handsome youths, lounging nonchalantly and staring down at passersby from their pedestals. Both inhabit the idealized in-between state of male youth: after childhood but before they grow the facial hair that will make them men. They have long hair, hairless faces, and fragmented genitals. Although their iconography is identifiable, in the context of the collection it is easy to see them as just two more bodies. They seemed like androgynous bodies to me, and that androgyny seemed unremarkable beyond the fact that it made them beautiful. I liked them. I wanted to identify with them.

A statue of Apollo, PMT 208, found in Rome, and a statue of Dionysus, PMT 156, discovered at the Villa Adriana, both of which are now in the Palazzo Massimo, Rome (photos: Gillies 2017).

This feeling was unsettling. Others have discussed the potential importance of Dionysus for genderqueer people, but I had never considered either of them as anything other than male. Both are praised for feminine beauty, but ultimately exhibit traditional and even toxic masculinity. One of my earliest forays into Latin literature had been Ovid’s story of Apollo and Daphne, in which Apollo enjoys Daphne’s fear and revulsion. As a scholar, I prided myself on looking for the meat of the ancient world, on insisting on all of its ugliness, on refusing to put the ancient world on a pedestal — and here I was, literally admiring it on a pedestal.

Also, I should add, I am not a man — and definitely not a ripped, godly one.

And yet. These statues were created to depict men in the liminal stage of male youth, and had been further destabilized by the vagaries and violence of time. Each was a νεάνισκος, the same word that Megillos had chosen for themself.

Unlike Megillos, however, the statues were not created for the purpose of shame.

I do see myself in Megillos, in Hermaphroditus, in Attis, and in Medea. I see them as icons in a history of othering and shame. I see them as people to claim and reclaim for the history of queer gender. The current language of nonbinary gender is relatively new, which can make us seem like a people without a history — it is essential to acknowledge that we have a history, and that it is riddled with exclusion, violence, disgust, and haunting lacunae.

At the same time, that very history makes it all the more essential to find ways to ease its weight. In looking at those two bodies as murky reflections of myself, I knew I was rewriting history — something I had sworn to avoid as a historian. But integral to many genderqueer people’s lives are episodes of personal rebirth and rewritten history. For me, that episode was in staring at two bodies in which I saw an unashamed version of myself. It felt like a new history. It felt like rebirth.

Grace Gillies is a PhD candidate at UCLA, and works on Roman street culture as well as queer history.

21

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

While we may not find a good time to watch the film together as a class, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is uploaded to our Sakai site under the “Video 47” tab.  If you have a chance to watch it, perhaps in sync with others from the class, please add your comments via hypothes.is here.

Ovid’s story of Orpheus and Eurdyice from the Metamorphoses is pasted below, for your reference.

Bk X:1-85 Orpheus and Eurydice

Hymen, called by the voice of Orpheus, departed, and, dressed in his saffron robes, made his way through the vast skies to the Ciconian coast: but in vain. He was present at Orpheus’s marriage, true, but he did not speak the usual words, display a joyful expression, or bring good luck. The torch, too, that he held, sputtered continually, with tear-provoking fumes, and no amount of shaking contrived to light it properly. The result was worse than any omens. While the newly wedded bride, Eurydice, was walking through the grass, with a crowd of naiads as her companions, she was killed, by a bite on her ankle, from a snake, sheltering there.  When Thracian Orpheus, the poet of Rhodope, had mourned for her, greatly, in the upper world, he dared to go down to Styx, through the gate of Taenarus, also, to see if he might not move the dead.

Through the weightless throng, and the ghosts that had received proper burial, he came to Persephone, and the lord of the shadows, he who rules the joyless kingdom. Then striking the lyre-strings to accompany his words, he sang: ‘O gods of this world, placed below the earth, to which, all, who are created mortal, descend; if you allow me, and it is lawful, to set aside the fictions of idle tongues, and speak the truth, I have not come here to see dark Tartarus, nor to bind Cerberus, Medusa’s child, with his three necks, and snaky hair. My wife is the cause of my journey. A viper, she trod on, diffused its venom into her body, and robbed her of her best years. I longed to be able to accept it, and I do not say I have not tried: Love won.

He is a god well known in the world above, though I do not know if that is so here: though I imagine him to be here, as well, and if the story of that rape in ancient times is not a lie, you also were wedded by Amor. I beg you, by these fearful places, by this immense abyss, and the silence of your vast realms, reverse Eurydice’s swift death. All things are destined to be yours, and though we delay a while, sooner or later, we hasten home. Here we are all bound, this is our final abode, and you hold the longest reign over the human race. Eurydice, too, will be yours to command, when she has lived out her fair span of years, to maturity. I ask this benefit as a gift; but, if the fates refuse my wife this kindness, I am determined not to return: you can delight in both our deaths.’

The bloodless spirits wept as he spoke, accompanying his words with the music. Tantalus did not reach for the ever-retreating water: Ixion’s wheel was stilled: the vultures did not pluck at Tityus’s liver: the Belides, the daughters of Danaüs, left their water jars: and you, Sisyphus, perched there, on your rock. Then they say, for the first time, the faces of the Furies were wet with tears, won over by his song: the king of the deep, and his royal bride, could not bear to refuse his prayer, and called for Eurydice.

She was among the recent ghosts, and walked haltingly from her wound. The poet of Rhodope received her, and, at the same time, accepted this condition, that he must not turn his eyes behind him, until he emerged from the vale of Avernus, or the gift would be null and void.

They took the upward path, through the still silence, steep and dark, shadowy with dense fog, drawing near to the threshold of the upper world. Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes. In an instant she dropped back, and he, unhappy man, stretching out his arms to hold her and be held, clutched at nothing but the receding air. Dying a second time, now, there was no complaint to her husband (what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?). She spoke a last ‘farewell’ that, now, scarcely reached his ears, and turned again towards that same place.

Stunned by the double loss of his wife, Orpheus was like that coward who saw Cerberus, the three-headed dog, chained by the central neck, and whose fear vanished with his nature, as stone transformed his body. Or like Olenos, and you, his Lethaea, too proud of your beauty: he wished to be charged with your crime, and seem guilty himself: once wedded hearts, you are now rocks set on moist Mount Ida.

Orpheus wished and prayed, in vain, to cross the Styx again, but the ferryman fended him off. Still, for seven days, he sat there by the shore, neglecting himself and not taking nourishment. Sorrow, troubled thought, and tears were his food. He took himself to lofty Mount Rhodope, and Haemus, swept by the winds, complaining that the gods of Erebus were cruel.

Three times the sun had ended the year, in watery Pisces, and Orpheus had abstained from the love of women, either because things ended badly for him, or because he had sworn to do so. Yet, many felt a desire to be joined with the poet, and many grieved at rejection. Indeed, he was the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys, and enjoy their brief springtime, and early flowering, this side of manhood.

Bk XI:1-66 The death of Orpheus

While the poet of Thrace, with songs like these, drew to himself the trees, the souls of wild beasts, and the stones that followed him, see, how the frenzied Ciconian women, their breasts covered with animal skins, spy Orpheus from a hilltop, as he matches songs to the sounding strings. One of them, her hair scattered to the light breeze, called: ‘Behold, behold, this is the one who scorns us!’ and hurled her spear at the face of Apollo’s poet, as he was singing. Tipped with leaves, it marked him, without wounding. The next missile was a stone, that, thrown through the air, was itself overpowered by the harmony of voice and lyre, and fell at his feet, as though it were begging forgiveness for its mad audacity. But in fact the mindless attack mounted, without restraint, and mad fury ruled. All their missiles would have been frustrated by his song, but the huge clamour of the Berecyntian flutes of broken horn, the drums, and the breast-beating and howls of the Bacchantes, drowned the sound of the lyre. Then, finally, the stones grew red, with the blood of the poet, to whom they were deaf.

First, the innumerable birds, the snakes, and the procession of wild animals, still entranced by the voice of the singer, a mark of Orpheus’s triumph, were torn apart by the Maenads. Then they set their bloody hands on Orpheus, and gathered, like birds that spy the owl, the bird of night, wandering in the daylight, or as in the amphitheatre, on the morning of the staged events, on either side, a doomed stag, in the arena, is prey to the hounds. They rushed at the poet, and hurled their green-leaved thyrsi, made for a different use. Some threw clods of earth, some branches torn from the trees, and others flints. And so that their madness did not lack true weapons, by chance, oxen were turning the soil under the ploughshare, and, not far away from them, brawny farm workers were digging the solid earth, sweating hard to prepare it for use, who fled when they saw the throng, leaving their work tools behind. Hoes, heavy mattocks, and long rakes lay scattered through the empty fields. After catching these up, and ripping apart the oxen, that threatened them with their horns, the fierce women rushed back to kill the poet. As he stretched out his hands, speaking ineffectually for the first time ever, not affecting them in any way with his voice, the impious ones murdered him: and the spirit, breathed out through that mouth to which stones listened, and which was understood by the senses of wild creatures – O, God! – vanished down the wind.

The birds, lamenting, cried for you, Orpheus; the crowd of wild creatures; the hard flints; the trees that often gathered to your song, shedding their leaves, mourned you with bared crowns. They say the rivers, also, were swollen with their own tears, and the naiads and dryads, with dishevelled hair, put on sombre clothes. The poet’s limbs were strewn in different places: the head and the lyre you, Hebrus, received, and (a miracle!) floating in midstream, the lyre lamented mournfully; mournfully the lifeless tongue murmured; mournfully the banks echoed in reply. And now, carried onward to the sea, they left their native river-mouth and reached the shores of Lesbos, at Methymna. Here, as the head lay exposed on the alien sand, its moist hair dripping brine, a fierce snake attacked it. But at last Phoebus came, and prevented it, as it was about to bite, and turned the serpent’s gaping jaws to stone, and froze the mouth, wide open, as it was.

The ghost of Orpheus sank under the earth, and recognised all those places it had seen before; and, searching the fields of the Blessed, he found his wife again and held her eagerly in his arms. There they walk together side by side; now she goes in front, and he follows her; now he leads, and looks back as he can do, in safety now, at his Eurydice.’

Bk XI:67-84  The transformation of the Maenads

However, the god, Lyaeus, did not allow such wickedness by his followers to go unpunished. Grieved by the loss of the poet of his sacred rites, he immediately fastened down, with twisted roots, all the Thracian women who had seen the sin, since the path, that each one was on, at that moment, gripped their toes and forced the tips into the solid ground. As a bird, when it is caught in a snare, set by a cunning wild-fowler, and feels itself held, tightens the knot by its movement, beating and flapping; so each of the women, planted, stuck fast, terrified, tried uselessly to run. But the pliant roots held her, and checked her, struggling. When she looked for where her toenails, toes and feet were, she saw the wood spreading over the curve of her leg, and, trying to strike her thighs with grieving hands, she beat on oak: her breasts turned to oak: her shoulders were oak. You would have thought the jointed arms were real branches, and your thought would not have been wrong.

VI

Race, Ethnicity, and Imperialism: Cleopatra

Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, carved 1876, marble, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois, 1994.17

For this unit, we will begin with a chapter from the Cambridge Ancient History on Egypt.  This chapter will give you some information about the complex history of Egypt and what was happening between Rome and Egypt before and during the life of Cleopatra.  You may also see some conventions and biases of the field in this entry.  Second, please read three portrayals of Cleopatra by three Roman poets of late-Republican/early-Imperial (so-called “Augustan” Rome: Vergil (ca. 70 BCE – 19 BCE) Horace (65 – 8 BCE), and Propertius (ca. 50 – 15 BCE).

Third, please read Dr. Haley’s piece, in which she interrogates the conventional narrative in Classics about Cleopatra.

Next, I’ve provided for you the reference materials that Haley discusses in her essay, including the Ptolemaic stemma from the same Cambridge Ancient History as the entry we begin with this week.

Finally, you’ll see a video that presents the problematic history of “white-washing” Mediterranean antiquity from a different perspective.

In addition to these assigned materials, another Part of this Pressbook follows — perhaps not all posted yet, but coming! — containing recommend, supplemental readings on the topic that you may want to peruse before Dr. Haley’s lecture on 10/19.

22

Egypt, 146–31 B.C.

This chapter from the Cambridge Ancient History didn’t OCR/upload very well.  I’m not sure I’m going to have time to edit it, so please have a look at the PDF here.  You may still use this page to post hypothes.is comments.

–Jody

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Thompson, D. (1994). “Egypt, 146–31 B.C. In J. Crook, A. Lintott, &amp; E. Rawson (Eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History (The Cambridge Ancient History, pp. 310-326). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THE LATER PTOLEMIES 3 I Ibrother. For the Egyptian population he sought the role of pharaoh.However, he was not respected by the Alexandrian Greeks or by visitingRomans who decried his monstrous paunch (he was disrespectfullyknown as Physcon, Pot-belly), his dress and lifestyle; his persecutionsand his personal predilections resulted in a uniformly hostile receptionby the classical commentators.3 In c. 140 he took as a second wife his nieceCleopatra III, daughter of his first wife and of his late brother,Philometor. The jealous struggles of the two Cleopatras, mother anddaughter, now began in earnest, and the attempted coup of Philometor’sarmy officer Galaistes is but one sign of the simmering unrest.4 The openpersecution of the Greeks of Alexandria with the subsequent dispersal ofthe intelligentsia had probably started soon after his return to power.Such evil acts of individual rulers dominate the historiography of theperiod.5 The evidence of the papyri, being scrappy and scattered in itssurvival, occasionally illuminates the scene but cannot supply thepolitical framework which is missing from the record.In 140/39 B.C. a Roman embassy headed by P. Cornelius ScipioAemilianus, together with Spurius Mummius and L. Caecilius MetellusCalvus visited Alexandria on an eastern fact-finding mission. This mayhave been the occasion of Polybius’ visit to the country. His unattractivepicture of the divisions in Alexandria — ignoring the Jews of the city hedivided the population there into Egyptians, unruly mercenaries and theGreek Alexandrians — may be matched by a Stoic account of theoverweight and flimsily dressed ruler who needed Scipio’s arm forsupport. The sumptuousness of the palace and of the royal entertainmentdid not make a favourable impression. Escorted upriver to Memphis onthe regular tourist round, the Romans admired the natural resources ofthe kingdom which could be so great, if only rulers worthy of it could befound.6The later Ptolemies did not provide such leadership. Towards the endof the decade, by November 132, Euergetes’ personal problems cameinto the open with the outbreak of a bitter civil war between the kingwith his second wife Cleopatra III and her mother, his first wife,Cleopatra II.7 In Egypt Cleopatra II took command of the troops andintroduced a new system of dating and cult titles. Euergetes, who wasstill minting in Alexandria in late September 131,8 now fled to Cyprus3 Heinen 1985 (D 196) discusses the sources. * Diod. XXXIIMO, 22.5 Polyb. xxxiv. 14.6-8; Jac. FGrH 270 F 9, Menecles of Barca; Diod. xxxm.6; Val. Max.ix.2.ext.j; Just. Epit. xxxvm.8.2-4.6 Polyb. xxx1v.14.1-j; Ath. xn.j49d-e, probably Panaetius rather than Posidonius; Diod.XXXIII.28b. 1-5.7 The demotic Malcolm papyrus, Pl^enJ 10584 (11 Nov. 132 B.C.), had Cleopatra III without hermother in the dating formula (information from C. J. Martin, who is to publish this papyrus).8 Morkholm 197; (B 207) 10—11; still in Egypt in October 131, PLeiJ 373 a+UPZ 128 (joOctober 131 B.C.), in Luddeckens i960 (D 208) 93-5 Urk. 37.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

512Alt30°NE”f1 IS ‘ E] SYRIARosettaWV-^^^X,^ / 1\\ /Leontopolis N^^/•Heliopolis 1MemphisS^a’r0 SuezASaqqara* \ X /FAYUM ) / ^>SocnopaeiNesus „./.,, ^. / \<-j^J>^_Philadelphia \ STheadelphia. __%-) ^-i \,Kerkeosiris. *^r/Crocodilopolis \ \Tebtunis- j^i Heracleopolis ) >vOxyrhynchus-f / \ \.yiHermopolis ^\ \^ jPtolemais*] \^.^ ^^pendera LeucosHermonthis(Arrnant) j LuxorPathyris<Gebelen).Y°cod’l0(>0llsLatopolis-VjApollonopolis Magna •( EDFU(•KomOmboElephantinePhilae1Land over 1000 metresLuxor Modern place-names underlined0_ _ 2g0km6 idOmilcsI’SyeneASSUAN/30k ay, msARABIA1 ‘ -L\Berenice*^”\ii EgyptCambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

THE LATER PTOLEMIES 3 I 3where he had murdered Memphites, his son by Cleopatra II. Thesetroubles (ameixia) are used as a key point in the later land surveys ofKerkeosiris in the South Fayum and in the Heracleopolite nomos; landgrants were divided into those made up to Year 39 (132/1 B.C.) and thosefrom Year 40 (131/30 B.C.).9 In her husband’s absence the papyri suggestthat Cleopatra enjoyed some success even as far south as the Thebaid, butEuergetes II soon returned to reside in the old Egyptian capital ofMemphis. With an Egyptian military leader, Paos, in the Thebaid, theking seems largely to have relied on native support. As so often whentrouble broke out in Alexandria, elsewhere in Egypt the age-old rivalriessurfaced in many forms. The conflicts which resulted from the instabilityof Ptolemaic rule might show racial, regional, religious and economicaspects. The breakaway tendency of Thebes and the south may be seen inthe person of Harsiesis, a native ruler of short duration who profitedfrom royal unrest to establish partial control in Thebes, the home ofAmon.10 ‘The Potter’s Oracle’, an apocalyptic work in Greek mostprobably based on a demotic original, may date from these years.Following a period of assorted disasters — famine, murder, the collapseof the moral order, oppression and civil war – all would again be wellwith the Greek power finally destroyed. The Egyptian gods would berestored to Memphis; the city on the coast would be deserted.11By April 129 Euergetes was once again sufficiently in control to beginto settle his Egyptian troops. In the forty-first year of his reign (130/29)the South Fayum village of Kerkeosiris received the first settlementthere of Egyptian troops — eight cavalrymen (one with 30 arourai (7.5hectares) and seven with 20 arourai (5 hectares)) and thirty infantrymenwith 7 arourai (1.75 hectares). In close connexion with these military landgrants 130 arourai of good cultivable land were dedicated to Soknebtunis(the local crocodile-god Souchos, lord of Tebtunis, a neighbouringtown). Troops were thus rewarded, native cults encouraged and royalcontrol upheld. This native settlement was made on land earlierbelonging to substantial Greek cleruchs; immigrants were giving way toEgyptians.Yet in the south the whole decade is marked by sporadic violence andbanditry. The small-scale raids on the local dykes of Crocodilopolis byvillagers from the neighbouring area of Hermonthis at the time of theNile flood in September 123 typify this unrest. The priests of Souchoscomplained to a local official that the land has gone unsown; both theirtemple and the royal interest suffer.12 How far such local disputes, the’ PTebt 60.67, 90; BGU 2441.119.10 Koenen 1959(0 199).11 Koenen 1970 (D 201); Lloyd 1982 (D 206); cf Johnson 1984 (D 197) 116—21; Tait 1977 (D 234)4j-8 for a (later) demotic version. 12 WChrest 11.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

314 8f. EGYPT, 146-31 B.C.replay of age-old rivalries, derive directly from the political instability ofthe period is unknown. What is clear is that when political control fromAlexandria was weak, all forms of abuse flourished. When on 28 April118 the royal rulers, Euergetes II and his two queens, Cleopatras II andIII, uneasily reconciled since 124, issued a decree of amnesty, its scopewas far-reaching.13 With the aim of restoring peace those who had fledwere encouraged to return home. Royal generosity was coupled with anattempt to control the abuse of official power. Debts to the crown and allforms of arrears were remitted, whilst crown farmers, revenue-workers,beekeepers and textile-workers were protected in their professions.What had become the regular concessions were made to the temples andto their priests. The rights of military settlers (deruchs) were increased.The summary arrest and imprisonment of individuals was limited and atall levels officials were restrained and controlled: no illegal levies at thecustoms-posts (or elsewhere), no bribes and requisitioning. Billetingwas severely constrained and, following the troubles, the reconstructionof both temples and private housing was endorsed; planting andagriculture were encouraged. Such decrees of beneficence and bountywere well known in Egypt though this is the most comprehensive of allthat survive. However practices prohibited in its provisions are likely tohave continued and the extent of its coverage serves only to documentthe extent of the prevailing disorder.The uneasy reconciliation of Euergetes II and his two wives was soonended by his death in the summer of 116, in the fifty-fourth year of hisreign. The succession was not clear and once again conflict in the rulinghouse, between the two Cleopatras, had economic repercussions. Thestate of agriculture in the years following Euergetes’ death suggests thenew rulers experienced some difficulty in establishing their control overthe country. At Kerkeosiris in the South Fayum only 24 per cent of thecleruchic land of the military settlers was sown with wheat in 116/15compared with 43 per cent in 119/18, and the derelict land rose from 24per cent to 58 per cent of the area. By 113/12 however a noticeableimprovement had taken place with only 34 per cent of this landregistered as derelict and 34 per cent under wheat, the major crop of thecountry.14 Such detailed records of change, preserved on waste papyrusused to wrap the sacred crocodiles, may of course simply reflect localconditions that are otherwise unknown, but often they can be shown tobe the product of the political state of the country where lack of centralcontrol carried direct consequences for agriculture.The actual succession following the death of Euergetes II is variouslyrecorded; the different versions well illustrate the problem of sources forthis period which lacks a coherent narrative. Of the classical authors the13 PTebt ) = COrdPtol. 53 (118 B.C.) with Bingen 1984(0 174)926-52. •« PTtbt 1 and iv.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

THE LATER PTOLEMIES 3 I 5main source for the alternating reigns of the two surviving sons ofEuergetes II, Ptolemy IX Soter II and Ptolemy X Alexander, isPausanias’ guide to the monuments of Greece which comments on thestatues of the Ptolemies at the entrance to the Odeum in Athens. ForPausanias, as for the later writers Justin and Eusebius, the story is one ofjealousy and scandal, of plots and intrigues, of dastardly deeds of murderand the comings and goings of kings.15 With a strong overlay of moraldisapproval, classical authors ascribe full responsibility for the downfallof the Ptolemaic kingdom to these later kings and queens.16 Andfollowing the death of Euergetes II, her uncle-husband, it is CleopatraIII who dominates the scene, scheming for the succession of the youngerson Alexander. Egyptian sources however, especially the hieroglyphs onthe temple walls at Edfu, have been seen as suggesting a somewhatdifferent course of events. Contrary to the picture of the classical sources,Soter II and Alexander were perhaps only half-brothers, the sonsrespectively of the two wives of Euergetes II, Cleopatra II and herdaughter Cleopatra III, and as competitors for the throne each waschampioned by his mother who, during her lifetime, ruled together withhim.17 All interpretations agree in stressing queenly power in these years;this reached an extreme in 105/4 when Cleopatra III replaced the regularmale priest of the dynastic cult in Alexandria {Sammelbuch 10763). From aPathyrite demotic contract (PKyldem. in 20) it is clear that at least for abrief period following the death of Euergetes II on 28 June 116 the twoCleopatras reigned together with Ptolemy IX Soter II; the queen whothen shared the throne with Soter II was probably Cleopatra III. Theking’s younger brother Alexander was meanwhile based in Cyprus. Bythe end of October 107 Ptolemy X Alexander had supplanted his elderbrother on the throne, whilst Soter II in turn sought refuge in Cyprus.18The joint reign of Cleopatra III and her son continued until her death in101; she was now replaced on the throne by Alexander’s wife CleopatraBerenice, the daughter of Soter II. According to Pausanias, in a tale ofmurder and revenge, Alexander was personally responsible for hismother’s death. Since her husband’s death her position had not beenaltogether secure, and already in 103 it was perhaps a sense of insecuritythat led her to send away to Cos her ‘grandsons’ (in fact two sons of SoterII and one of Alexander) accompanied by the royal treasure. The15 Paus. 1.9.1-3; Just. Spit, xxxix.3.1—2; 4.1-6; 5.1-3; Porph. FGrH 260 F 32 = Euseb. Cbron.1.163-4 (Schoene).16 E.g. Ath. xii.5 jo b, Ptolemy X Alexander rivalled his father in obesity; his agility in after-dinner dancing was remarkable, whilst to relieve himself he needed two to support him.17 Cauville and Devauchelle 1984 (D 178) 47-50, disagreeing with Otto and Bengtson 1938 (D216) 112-93, Volkmann 1959(0242) 1738-48 and Musti 1960(0 214); in arguing that Cleopatra IIcontinued as queen until 107 B.C. they fail to take account of contemporary Greek inscriptions,especially OCIS 739, and the cumulative evidence of demotic protocols, especially those fromThebes. l8 For the date see Boswinkel and Pestman 1982 (D 177) 67-9.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

3 l6 Sc. EGYPT, 146—31 B.C.alienation overseas of royal wealth was to become standard practice inthe first century B.C.; on this first occasion the immediate beneficiary wasMithridates VI of Pontus who in 88 took both the island and theprinces.19With Soter II ruling in Cyprus as an independent king, the wealth andunity of the country were divided. Soon the division became tripartitewhen Soter II, retaining Cyprus alone, was replaced as king in Cyrene byPtolemy Apion. Justin (xxxix.5.2) tells that Apion, a bastard son ofEuergetes II, received this inheritance from his father in 116 B.C. If SO,inscriptions show his father’s will was long ignored with Soter II oustedfrom Cyrene only after his loss of the Egyptian throne. Whether Romehad exercised influence on the will of Euergetes II cannot be known. Theextent however of unofficial Roman penetration may be seen in twoLatin graffiti from Philae in Upper Egypt that are contemporary with theking’s death and dated by the consuls of that year. And when a memberof the Senate visited in 112 official arrangements preceded his tour of thesights.20 In any event, a further blow to Ptolemaic power was sustainedwhen, as a recognized alternative to prolonging dynastic discord, on hisdeath in 96 Ptolemy Apion left Cyrene to Rome. Rome’s lack ofimmediate intervention is of less interest here than the act of legacy itself.Ptolemy X Alexander followed suit, leaving what remained of thePtolemaic kingdom, both Cyprus and Egypt, to Rome.21 Again Romewas to be slow in claiming her legacy but there is no clearer indication ofher pre-eminence in Mediterranean politics than her recurrent nomi-nation as territorial legatee.Alexander survived on the Egyptian throne until 88 when theAlexandrians ejected him. Soter II now returned to take Alexandria,defeating Alexander in the countryside. The younger brother then fledto Myra in Lycia and from there towards Cyprus; the Edfu temple simplyrecords a voyage to Punt, the archetypal ‘foreign parts’. Caught at sea hewas defeated and killed.22 The elder brother, Soter II, in control ofAlexandria still faced the problem of renewed revolt in the Thebaid. Ittook three years finally to crush the home of Amon and ‘he did suchdamage that there was nothing left to remind the Thebans of theirformer prosperity’.23This bare and somewhat confused outline of events may be supple-mented by documents and inscriptions from Egypt. There had been19 App. Mi/A. 4.23.20 SEC XXVIII. 148 5; cf PTeb/ a = WCbrei/ 3 (112 B.C.). Full discussion in van ‘t Dack 1980 (D184) and 1983 (D 186).21 Badian 1967 (D 169) argues convincingly for this identification rather than with Alexander II.22 Euseb. Cbron 1.164 (Schoene) is the main source (cf Porph. FGrH 260 F 32.8-9). Using thenumismatic evidence Morkholm 197; (B 207) 14-1 j modifies the discussion of Samuel 1965 (D 230);see Zauzich 1977 (D 249) 193 for Year 26= 29 of the king outside Egypt. a Paus. 1.9.3.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

THE LATER PTOLEMIES 317unrest in the Thebaid for some years. In 90 B.C. rebels had attacked theLatopolite and Pathyrite nomoi, and in the stasis of 88 Platon, asepistrategos of the Thebaid, had at least one native commander (Nech-thyris) under him. A mosaic of local rivalries emerges with Pathyrissupporting Platon, its priests loyal to Soter II against the neighbouringtemples of Thebes; here it was Hathor opposing Amon.24 Indeed duringboth phases of his reign Ptolemy IX Soter II, who through the nameLathyrus, Chick-pea, was made an object of ridicule to the Greeks,appears to have been well aware of Egyptian sensitivities and, especially,cults. Early in his reign, together with his mother he had madeconcessions to the priests of Chnoum at Elephantine25 and, born in thesame year as an Apis bull, he showed consistent concern for thisparticular cult. In contrast, under his brother Alexander sacred bullstended to suffer. At Hermonthis in Upper Egypt the Buchis bull born inApril 101 B.C., with Alexander on the throne, was not installed untilApril 82, after the restoration of Soter II; it survived only five yearsmore. And in Memphis the Apis bull which had died in his brother’sreign (sometime after June 96) was only given a proper burial in theeleventh year of its successor. This was in 87/6 when the Apis burialprobably accompanied the second coronation of Soter II, now it>hm-bc,’repeating the diadem’ in his celebration at Memphis of a thirty-year Sed-festival, a renewal of power in the old Egyptian style.26 In his long-drawn-out struggle with Thebes Memphis had served as base for Soter IIand the cults of Lower Egypt had supported this sovereign when facedwith the defection of the south.Internal dissension was only one of Egypt’s problems; there wasRome too. At Edfu the great pylon had been started in 116 B.C. Aninscription on the temple enclosure wall from around 88 records itsdecoration with inscriptions and all of the ritual scenes designed to repelstrangers.27 Yet it was in vain that the Egyptians sought for divineprotection. In 87/6 whilst fighting was continuing in the Thebaid agroup of Romans came to Alexandria. Sulla’s quaestor L. LiciniusLucullus was looking for ships to build up a Sullan fleet. His encounterin Alexandria with the newly restored Ptolemy IX Soter II typifies thedifferent modes of Rome and eastern kings. Met by the entire Egyptianfleet Lucullus was offered unprecedented hospitality within the royalpalace. An entertainment allowance four times the norm was made andrich gifts offered him to the value of eighty talents; the statutory touristvisit upriver was arranged. Treated as an equal by an oriental king the24 P Berldem 13.608 (90 B.C.); Sammelbucb 6300; 6644; WCbresI 12 (88 B.C.). On the identificationof those involved see Thomas 1975 (D 237) 117-19. 25 OGIS 168.26 Crawford 1980(0 182) 12-14; Traunecker ‘979 (D 24′)429~3’-21 Cauville and Devauchelle 1984 (D 178) 43.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

THE LATER PTOLEMIES 319the Ptolemies to call himself god, theos, without the use of his name, andin Memphis the high priest Psenptais was appointed his personal priest.29To be pharaoh however was no longer sufficient and finally in 5 9 inreturn for 6,000 talents made over to Caesar and Pompey, the king wasofficially declared ‘friend and ally’ of the Roman people. Even beforethis, the independence of his kingdom was under threat. In 65 when M.Licinius Crassus as censor proposed making Egypt tributary to Rome hewas vigorously opposed by his colleague Q. Lutatius Catulus. In 64/3Pompey was in the East and extended Roman rule right up to the easternborder of Egypt. He did not, however, enter Egypt although thecountry was at variance with its king and the king himself invited him,sending him gifts, riches and clothing for his entire army. It was unclear,Appian records, whether he feared the strength of the kingdom whichstill enjoyed prosperity or the jealousy of his opponents, whether it wasoracles which stopped him or some other reason. Strabo recorded acrown worth 4,000 gold pieces sent to Pompey in Damascus and thewealth of Egypt was becoming even better known at Rome.30 When in63 Cicero spoke out against the Rullan agrarian proposals (ch. 9 below,pp. 349-51) he stressed the prosperity of the country, the bounty of itsfields.31Soon after his recognition in Rome Auletes was driven from hiskingdom by a populace enraged by his passivity. For Cyprus was beingannexed by Rome and lost to Egypt. Probably with a view to paying forhis new free corn distribution of 58, P. Clodius had proposed realizingthe king’s assets in Cyprus. M. Porcius Cato was sent out to put theproposal into effect and by 56 Cyprus was added to the province ofCilicia. As in 75/4 when Cyrene was at last settled by Rome and P.Lentulus Marcellinus successfully reorganized the royal lands whichprovided an income for Rome, so now Cyprus was to benefit the peopleof Rome, to the detriment of Egypt.32 Ptolemy, the brother of Auletes,committed suicide rather than submit. Auletes himself, showing noopposition to the final dismemberment of his kingdom, was forced toflee to Rome where Pompey provided him with credit and temporaryaccommodation. In Egypt Auletes was replaced on the throne by hisdaughter Berenice IV, at first with her sister Cleopatra Tryphaena andlater her new husband Archelaus, a son of Mithridates. Rome tooknotice. A counter-embassy from Alexandria appeared a threat toAuletes’ safety in Rome and he again departed eastwards, to Ephesus29 Porter and Moss 1927- (D 221) for temple-building; 0C1S 186.8-10 (14 May 62 B.C.) ‘kyriosbasileus Theos Neos Dionysos Philopator kai Philadelphos’; cf. the stele BM 886.4 ‘first prophet ofthe lord of two lands’ (ed. Reymond 1981 (D 227) 147).30 App. Milb. 17.114; Strabo in Joseph. A] xiv.55. 31 Cic. Leg. Agr. 11.43.32 Badian 1965 (c 162). For the Roman side of these events see ch. 10 below, p. 379.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

32O Sc. EGYPT, I46—3I B.C.where he found greater security living under the protection of Artemiswithin her temple. Egypt and the fate of the Egyptian king was now aRoman issue with Pompey and his opponents vying for an Egyptiancommand. In 5 7 the consul P. Lentulus Spinther was charged with therestoration of the Egyptian king, but the Sibylline books prevented thedeployment of an army. Events however overtook political decisionsand in the spring of 5 5 Aulus Gabinius, the proconsul in Syria, illegallyleft his province and escorted Auletes back to Alexandria. Cicero recordsGabinius’ fear of the fleet of Archelaus and the growing number ofpirates in the Mediterranean.33 The promises of 10,000 talents from theking cannot have been entirely unconnected. Mark Antony went toAlexandria as Gabinius’ cavalry commander and in Gabinius’ entouragewas Antipater, the Idumaean councillor of Hyrcanus II, high priest ofJerusalem and father of Herod the Great. The Jews of Egypt might be asignificant element in support of a particular sovereign and later, in 47,both Antipater and Hyrcanus were to be influential in gaining supportfor Caesar in the overthrow of Auletes’ heirs. Many of the invadingtroops, the Gabiniani, who came to range themselves in support of thePtolemaic dynasty, stayed on in Egypt — the first Roman troops ofoccupation.Auletes celebrated his return with his daughter’s death and othermurders. His ability to fulfil his financial promises seems to have beensomewhat limited. In Rome Gabinius was tried, fined the sum which hadbeen promised him and went bankrupt. In Egypt Rabirius Postumuswas appointed by the king to the chief financial post of the country, thatoidioiketes, but in spite of abandoning his toga and adopting Greek dresshe failed to recover the money owed to Pompey and other Romans; hewas driven ignominiously from the country. The Alexandrians whoearlier had shown ‘all zeal in looking after those visiting from Italy, keen,in their fear, to give no cause for complaint or war’ now had little timefor Roman interference. Two sons of Bibulus, now governor of Syria,who in 50 were sent to recall the Gabiniani from the attractions ofAlexandria in order to fight the Parthians were summarily put to death inthe city.34 Slaughter in the streets and in the gymnasium had becomeregular features of life in the capital city.Auletes was not long to enjoy his position as king. He died in 51leaving his kingdom to his elder son, Ptolemy XIII now aged ten, and tohis daughter, Cleopatra VII aged seventeen; the news of his deathreached Rome by the end of June.35 The Roman people was named aswitness to his will and a copy sent to Rome for deposit in the aerariumsomehow ended up in Pompey’s hands. Whatever the facts, the will of33 Cic. Rab. Post. 8.20. *• Caes. BCiv. 111.no; Val. Max. IV.I.IJ. 35 Cic. Fam. VIII.4.J.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

THE LATER PTOLEMIES 32IAuletes made open recognition of the overriding power of Rome tocontrol the future of Egypt. Any succession to the Egyptian throne nowtook place under Roman protection.Cleopatra VII however was primarily an Egyptian queen, the first ofher family to speak the language of the country she ruled.36 Ignoring herbrother she sought support within her kingdom. Barely a month afterher accession she travelled upriver to Hermonthis to be present in personat the installation of the Buchis bull on 22 March 51; she was later tobuild a small birth-temple to the god at Hermonthis.37 Likewise, when inthe third year of her reign the Apis died, she herself met part of the cultexpenses, endowing a table of offerings and providing daily rations forthose involved in the rites of burial. Earlier Ptolemies had provided cash;the detail of Cleopatra’s endowment is new and suggests some level ofpersonal involvement in the bull cults of Egypt which had come torepresent the essence of native religion. As the goddess Cleopatra theyounger, philopator, ‘father-loving’, and philopatris, ‘patriotic’ (BGU2376.1 (36/5 B.C.)), she was indeed queen of Egypt.In Rome however civil war intervened and the uncertainty of theoutcome can only have increased the dynastic tensions in Alexandriawhere, as regents, the eunuch Potheinus and general Achillas supportedthe cause of Ptolemy XIII against his elder sister. After PharsalusPompey fled in hope to Egypt where he was beheaded at Pelusium. Thedeed was not welcomed by Caesar when he reached Alexandria threedays later. The Alexandrian War ensued, fought over the winter of 48/7.The rest of the story is well known (see below pp. 433-4). Re-establishedas queen by Caesar at first with Ptolemy XIII as her husband, and later inMarch 47 with her even younger brother Ptolemy XIV, Cleopatra VIIused her scheming intelligence to the full. Cyprus was restored by Caesarto the crown of Egypt; it had served again as a haven for endangeredPtolemies when, together with his sister Arsinoe, the younger son ofAuletes was sent there briefly before being summoned to the throne andmarriage with his elder sister. Caesar dallied shortly, but then he left.Caesarion was born in 47, and in 46 Cleopatra and her son followedCaesar to Rome. She left in 44, soon after the Ides of March. In 41Antony first formed a liaison with the queen, which he was to resumefive years later. It lasted until after Actium and the capture of Alexandriaby Octavian on 3 August 30 (Vol. x2, ch. 1). Soon after, the queen died, aself-inflicted royal death at the bite of an asp, and Octavian was left tomanage the inheritance of the Ptolemies.36 Plut. Ant. 27.3-4.37 Mond and Myers 1934(0 213)11 12; Tarn 1936(0 235) 187-9; Bloedow 1965 (D 175) 91-2; cf.Skeat 1954 (D 233) 40—1 for a more sceptical interpretation.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

322 Sc. EGYPT, 146-31 B.C.II. EGYPT: SOCIETY AND ECONOMYWhat of the Egypt that Octavian was to inherit for Rome? The dynasticstruggles of the last century of Ptolemaic control with constant changesof ruler, significant overseas expenditure by Auletes and, latterly, theabsence of Cleopatra in Rome, had had their effect on the economy ofEgypt. Normally Egypt was a rich country. In cash terms, even underthe poor government of Auletes, Strabo (quoting Cicero) records thatthe annual income of the country was 12,500 talents. Auletes howeverhad been extravagant in the alienation of this wealth: gifts, gold andprovisions for Pompey in 63 B.C., 6,000 talents to Caesar and Pompey in59 and 10,000 to Gabinius in 5 5; and the Alexandrian envoys opposingthe king had equally brought their gold to Rome. The gold sarcophagusof Alexander the Great was even melted down to finance the king’sexpenditure and as dioiketes Rabirius had tried unsuccessfully to collectthe debts owed to individual Romans.38 On arrival in Alexandria in 48Caesar was still owed almost 3,000 talents of which just over sixteentalents were paid towards his army costs; the rest was remitted.39 EvenPtolemaic wealth was running low. The tetradrachm silver coinagewhich had maintained a high degree of fineness throughout the Ptole-maic period began to deteriorate under Auletes, dropping sharply insilver content in the years after his restoration.40 This decline in thequality of the silver coinage is a more reliable reflection of the difficultiesof Ptolemy XII and Cleopatra VII than the vagaries of the copperdrachmae used as units of account within the written documents.41Agriculture however – the pulcherrimi agri, the agrorum bonitas soenvied in Rome — formed the constant basis of Egyptian wealth and well-being. And agriculture, besides needing regular supervision with a closecontrol of the irrigation system, might suffer also from low Niles. Theeffects of both man-made and natural disaster on the cereal production ofthe country shows clearly in a group of Heracleopolite papyri now inBerlin.42 The secession of Thebes and the south soon after the resto-ration of Soter II (pp. 316-17 above) figures also in Middle Egypt as atime of interruption of communications (ameixia) which in 84/3, in theHeracleopolite nomos, resulted in flight from the land and the loss of taxesto the state.43 In the troubled middle years of the century unsettled con-ditions regularly interfered with corn-production and transport. Ship-contractors, naukleroi, might now be grouped in corporations and armed38 Strab. xvn. 1.13; App. MM. 17. ii4;Cic. Rab.Post. 3.6 with Suet. Cats. 54.3; Cic. Pit. 21.48-50;Plut. Ant. 3.2; Strab. xvn.1.8 for the sarcophagus, assuming Pareisactus, the son of Kokke, isAuletes; Dio xxxix. 13.2. 39 Plut. COM. 48.4. *° Walker 1976 (B 256) 150-2.41 Gara 1984 (D 193); on this hypothesis what is normally termed copper inflation (Reekmans1951 (D 226)) is not a true inflation but reflects rather a change in accounting procedures.<2 BGU VIII and xiv. Ai BGU 2370.37-42.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

EGYPT: SOCIETY AND ECONOMY 323guards accompanied the corn-ships down the Nile.44 The early years ofCleopatra’s reign were particularly hard in the countryside as naturaldisaster combined with political problems. Instructions preserved forthe collection of grain from the Heracleopolite nomos from 51/50 have aneven more urgent tone than usual; in the same year, in Hiera Nesos, thelocal priests complain that the royal cult has suffered from the depletionof the local population.45 A failure of the harvest is similarly suggestedby a royal order issued on 27 October 5 o which forbade, on pain of death,the transport of grain and pulses to any destination other than Alexan-dria; a loan contract of the same year foresees the possibility of cornreaching a vastly inflated price.46 A shortage of water, abrochia, in Year 3of Cleopatra VII (50/49 B.C.) led to the desertion of the village of Tinterisby all settlers in the area; the local farmers were unable to pay their taxes.And finally Pliny’s notice of the lowest flood ever in the year of Pharsalus(48 B.C.) suggests not so much the anger of the gods as the culmination ofa flood failure lasting over at least three years, and maybe more.47Peasants of course always complain and official papyrus archives in theirnature preserve these complaints, but the accumulation of evidence doesappear to add up to a picture of widespread disaster in these years.Another first-century papyrus preserves the tantalizing words ‘greed’and ‘Romans’ in a sentence now incomplete.48 Overseas debts wouldappear to have combined with natural catastrophe to oppress both thepopulation of Egypt and the Ptolemaic state. The new trade with Indiawas hardly sufficient to replace the income lost.49 All of Cleopatra’spowers were needed to counteract collapse; the kingdom she ruled wasvery down at heel.To function, the Ptolemaic state depended on its administrativebureaucracy and on the army. Neither was particularly successful inthese years. The last Ptolemaic decree to survive is an attempt to protectfarmers in the Delta who originated in Alexandria from the illegalexactions and harassment of crown officials.50 There is no reason tosuppose that this decree was any more successful than its predecessors;undue pressure from officials would seem one unavoidable consequenceof the unsalaried bureaucracy on which the Ptolemies relied. Centralcontrol was weak and government officials looked first to their owninterests. Loyalty to the Ptolemies, reinforced through the dynastic cult,was not sufficient to counteract the pressures of personal interests.The independence of Egypt depended on its military strength whichby the late second century B.C. was both depleted and as much Egyptianas immigrant. Loyalty of the troops towards the state was variously** BGU 1741-3 + 2368; 1742 (63 B.C). Thompson (Crawford) 1983 (D 238) 66-9.« BGU 1760; 1835. « COrdP/o/yy.PSI 1098.28-9. «7 BGU 1842; Pliny HNv.58.48 BGU 2430.26. ” Strab. xvn.1.13. w COrdPtol 75-6 (12 April 41 B.C).Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

3^4 8*. EGYPT, 146-31 B.C.fostered though ultimately the ability to provide pay was the decisivefactor. Since the early years of the dynasty soldiers had been settled onthe land as cleruchs, and rights over this land, as over housing billets,were gradually extended over the years. In Go B.C. a royal decree recordsthe free testamentary disposition of such holdings and it is clear that bynow even women might inherit cleruchic land.51 (What in such caseshappened to the military obligation is not clear.) Mercenaries too, fromall over the Mediterranean, played an important part in the militaryprotection of the country. In 5 8 Auletes was forced to flee his homebecause he had no mercenary troops;52 the city garrison in Alexandriaand household troops had presumably joined the other side. Since thereign of Philometor mercenary garrisons and their associated civiliancommunities had been regularly organized in politeumata, normallyethnic groupings with their own elected officers, the Idumaeans forexample, the Boeotians or the Cretans; the activities of these groups weresocial and religious.53 In a country where social groupings weretraditional (the guilds for instance of the mummifiers and undertakers ofpre-Ptolemaic Egypt), when times were unsettled the collective instinctgrew more strong. Alongside the associations of goose-herds, donkey-drivers or ship-contractors, in their corporate dealings the mercenarypoliteumata too might protect the interests of their members in relation tothe state.54 And here too, as within the bureaucracy, the dynastic cult hada cohesive function; temples might be dedicated by representatives ofthese politeumata on behalf of the royal family, or influential officialspraised for good will towards the ruling house.A further role of the army should be mentioned. Both throughgarrisons and cleruchic settlement the Ptolemaic army was one of themore important forces for the integration of immigrants within Egyp-tian society. The family archive from 150 to 88 B.C. of Peteharsemtheusson of Panebkhounis or that of Dryton stationed in the garrison atGebelen (Pathyris) show how easily such soldiers intermarried withEgyptian women; their children were bilingual often with both Greekand Egyptian names. Both languages might be used in legal documentsand families who once came from Crete or Cyrene were thus assimilatedinto the society of Egypt.55More generally however changes were taking place in the relationsbetween Greeks and Egyptians in the administration, for instance,where those of Greek extraction would seem at first to have predomi-nated within its upper echelons. From the late second century B.C.51 COrdPtol 71.12-15; BGU xiv Appendix 3. 52 Dio xxxix. 12.2-3.53 Thompson (Crawford) 1984 (D 239).54 IFay 109 (37 B.C.); WCbrist 440 (first cent. B.C.); BGU 1741 —3 + 2368 (63 B.C).55 Pestman 196; (D 218) 47—105; Winnicki 1972 (D 245); Pestman 1978 (D 220) 30-7. Forintermarriage and assimilation of Cyrenaeans in the Fayum earlier see / Fay 2 (224-221 B.C).Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

EGYPT: SOCIETY AND ECONOMY 325however two governor-generals of the Thebaid and a series of rwmosgovernors in the south are found with Egyptian names.56 Whereas theapparent family succession to high administrative office found here mayprimarily reflect the breakaway tendency of the south, it also shows somechange of emphasis and the opening up to Egyptians of the top levels ofthe administration. Similarly the increasingly frequent bi- or trilingualpublication of royal decrees suggests some recognition by the rulingpower of the importance of the Egyptian element in society. FromSaqqara near Memphis a demotic archive with a few Greek documentsshows that by the first century B.C. even those from the most traditionalof Egyptian occupations, the mummifiers, had begun to adapt their waysto those of the ruling race. When in 99 Petesis, undertaker-in-chief of theApis and Mnevis bulls, found himself and his property under attack heappealed to the king for protection. In answer to his request he wasgranted a wooden plaque with an official (but in the event ineffective)warning to trespassers, written in both Greek and Egyptian. When tenyears later his son Chonouphis made a loan, the contract was in Greek;and when his granddaughter Thaues was also named Asklepias this wasthe first Greek name in a family recorded over ten generations.57The process of reciprocal acculturation can be seen only sporadically.Whilst proceeding at different rates in different contexts it affected alllevels of society. On the walls of the great temple at Edfu, Horos dragsSeth around tied by his feet in a positively Homeric scene, and from thenearby cemetery of Hassaia come elaborate epitaphs in both Greek andhieroglyphs celebrating members of a family of senior military officers,who are also priests within the local cults, recorded with both Greek andEgyptian names; the same individuals are recorded in both Greek andEgyptian forms.58 Both the culture of classical Greece expressed inepigrammatic form and the native culture of Egypt with all its religiousovertones are there, in active intercommunication.It was probably the gods and temples of Egypt which togetherremained the single most powerful force in the life of the Ptolemaickingdom for Greek and Egyptians alike. Yet even this was a forcediminished in strength. Greek cult continued for the Greeks, especiallyin Alexandria, yet increasingly behind Greek names Egyptian gods lurkin disguise. (Herakles Kallinikos for instance whose temple at Theadel-phia was linked with that of Isis Eseremphthis may well have beenHarsaphes or possibly Onouris.)59 And for the Greeks too the religion oftheir adopted country proved strong and might be turned against56 De Meulenaere 1959 (D 211) and Shore 1979 (D 232); Thissen 1977 (D 236), Hermonthite.57 UPZ 106-9 (99~98 BC); I25 (89 B.C.); • 18 (83 B.C.).58 Derchain 1974 (D 187) 15-19; Yoyotte 1969 (D 248); Clarysse 1985 (D 179) 62-4.59 Sammelbucb 6z$(i = lFaj 114(708.0.). Bonnet 1952(0 176) 286-7.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

326 Sc. EGYPT, 146-31 B.C.foreign powers. Whilst Amon and the south were often in opposition tothe powers of Lower Egypt, the high priesthood of Memphis remainedconsistently loyal to the Ptolemies and enjoyed strong personal relationswith the ruling house. Ptolemies built Egyptian temples to the nativegods and in return the gods of Egypt and their priesthood wouldsupport their rule. Concessions to the temples and their priests conti-nued to form a regular element of Ptolemaic royal decrees. So in 100 B.C.when Ptolemy X Alexander I ruled with Cleopatra Berenice a royaldecree was promulgated protecting sacred fish.60 From the first centuryB.C. survives a series of decrees recording royal grants of asylum grantedto village temples of Thracian, Greek and Egyptian gods, grants whichrecall those earlier made to the great Egyptian temples of Memphis orBousiris, now in the troubled later years of Ptolemaic rule extended morewidely.61 Sometimes set up bilingually, these decrees may be seen toindicate an extension of violence in the countryside and the relativeweakness of the local shrines. There are however two further respects inwhich they throw interesting light on the period. Firstly in these decrees,bound close to the local village cults, appears the dynastic cult of thePtolemies, with cult images, sacrifices, libations, burnt offerings andsacred lights. Grants made to an Egyptian god like Isis Sachypsis or IsisEseremphthis at Theadelphia might also benefit the royal gods.Secondly they illustrate the role of the army and the Greek militarysettlers in Egypt. These grants of asylum are regularly negotiatedthrough senior army officers who now it seems were established asinfluential members of the local community. In these grants may be seenreflected the interlocking interests of priests, army and crown in thecontinuation and success of the Ptolemaic regime. Finally, however,through the troubled years of the first century B.C. not even the strengthand power of the gods of Egypt could resist the force of Rome.62«> PYale 56.61 Sammtlbuch 620 = COrdPtol64 (96 B.C.);/Fay 152 (95 B.C.); 112-13 (93 B.C.); 114(70 B.C.); 135(69 B.C); 136 (69-68 B.C.); COrdPtol702(63 B.C.); IFaj 116-18 (57 B.C.); COrdPtol^ (46 B.C.); BGU1212 (46 B.C.) with van ‘t Dack 1970 (D 183); Donadoni 1983 (D 188); 0C1S 129 (47-30 B.C.)reaffirming an asylum grant for a synagogue made earlier by Euergetes II. My interpretation is atvariance with that of Dunand 1979 (D 189). 62 This chapter was last revised in 1986.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

3 l8 %C. EGYPT, 146—31 B.C.Roman quaestor was doubtless expected to reciprocate at some time inthe future. As others were to learn, this was not the Roman way.Lucullus rejected both tour and gifts; he left without the ships hesought.28From Lucullus Sulla will have received a firsthand report on thewealth of Egypt. So on the death of Soter late in 81, although to dateRome had taken no action on his younger brother’s will, now that theAlexandrians lacked a king and Ptolemy X Alexander’s widow was onthe throne, Sulla sent out as king and consort the son of Ptolemy X, herstepson, Ptolemy XI Alexander II. Captured on Cos by Mithridates VI in88, Alexander II had in 84 escaped from Pontus to Sulla and through himto Rome. Exiled from Egypt for the past twenty-three years, the newking did not care for his stepmother-wife whom he speedily hadmurdered. After only three weeks on the throne he in turn perished, atthe hands of the Alexandrians who resented both the interference ofRome and the excesses of Sulla’s nominee. These royal internecineconflicts, the people of Alexandria, and the power of Rome interacted tohasten the collapse of Ptolemaic Egypt.For the moment Rome exercised restraint. The two sons of Soter II,sent like their cousin to safety on Cos in 103 and captured by Mithridates,now returned from Syria to their home. As Ptolemy XII Neos Dionysosthe elder took the throne in Egypt, the younger brother made do withCyprus for his rule. The (interrupted) thirty years of the reign of PtolemyXII, more commonly called Auletes, the Fluteplayer, were fatal for theindependence of the country. Popillius Laenas’ ultimatum at Eleusis in168 B.C. (Vol. vni2, pp. 344-5) and the testament of Ptolemy XAlexander were earlier stages in a process which was to culminate in theannexation of Egypt by Augustus. Under Auletes Egypt becamesubordinate to political issues and personalities in Rome as the kingstruggled to retain his control. His position at home was not unchal-lenged and in 75 two sons of Cleopatra Selene (by one of the Seleuciddynasty) came to Rome in quest of the Egyptian throne. They stayed justover a year before returning empty-handed, and the young Antiochuswho returned via Sicily had bad experiences at the hands of its governorVerres. Meanwhile in Egypt Auletes hung on, cultivating good relationswith the Egyptian hierarchy and sponsoring widespread temple-build-ing. The great Horos temple at Edfu was finished in his reign and he builton to temples at Karnak, Deir el Medina and Medinet Habu in Thebes,Dendera, Kom Ombo, Philae, Dabod, Athribis, Medamud, Hermonthisand on Bigga Island. As always such gifts to the gods demanded somerecognition in return and under Auletes there appears a significantdevelopment in the divinity of the king himself. Auletes was the first of28 Plut. Luc. 2.5-3.1.Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521256032.011Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Claremont Colleges Library, on 04 Oct 2020 at 16:09:28, subject to the Cambridge

23

Vergil's Aeneid Book VIII

Here, we enter back into the Aeneid after Aeneas has made it to Italy, where he is at war with the native Rutulians.  Aeneas has journeyed to the future site of Rome and met Evander, the Greek who has colonized the site.

Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved

‘Venus Ordering Arms from Vulcan for Aeneas’ – Jean Restout (France, 1692-1768), LACMA Collections

BkVIII:306-369 Pallanteum – the Site of Rome

Then they all returned to the city, the sacred rites complete.

The king walked clothed with years, and kept Aeneas and his son

near him for company, lightening the road with various talk.

Aeneas marvelled, and scanned his eyes about

eagerly, captivated by the place, and delighted

to enquire about and learn each tale of the men of old.

So King Evander, founder of Rome’s citadel, said:

‘The local Nymphs and Fauns once lived in these groves,

and a race of men born of trees with tough timber,

who had no laws or culture, and didn’t know how

to yoke oxen or gather wealth, or lay aside a store,

but the branches fed them, and the hunter’s wild fare.

Saturn was the first to come down from heavenly Olympus,

fleeing Jove’s weapons, and exiled from his lost realm.

He gathered together the untaught race, scattered among

the hills, and gave them laws, and chose to call it Latium,

from latere, ‘to hide’, since he had hidden in safety on these shores.

Under his reign was the Golden Age men speak of:

in such tranquil peace did he rule the nations,

until little by little an inferior, tarnished age succeeded,

with war’s madness, and desire for possessions.

Then the Ausonian bands came, and the Siconian tribes,

while Saturn’s land of Latium often laid aside her name:

then the kings, and savage Thybris, of vast bulk,

after whom we Italians call our river by the name

of Tiber: the ancient Albula has lost her true name.

As for me, exiled from my country and seeking

the limits of the ocean, all-powerful Chance,

and inescapable fate, settled me in this place,

driven on by my mother the Nymph Carmentis’s

dire warnings, and my guardian god Apollo.’

He had scarcely spoken when advancing he pointed out

the altar and what the Romans call the Carmental Gate,

in ancient tribute to the Nymph Carmentis,

the far-seeing prophetess, who first foretold

the greatness of Aeneas’s sons, the glory of Pallanteum.

Next he pointed to a vast grove, which brave Romulus would restore

as a sanctuary, and the Lupercal, the Wolf’s Cave, under a cold cliff,

named in the Arcadian way for the wolf-god, Lycaean Pan.

And he also pointed out the grove of sacred Argiletum

calling the place to witness, relating the death of Argus his guest.

He leads him from here to the Tarpeian Rock and the Capitol,

now all gold, once bristling with wild thorns.

Even then the dreadful holiness of the place awed the fearful

country folk, even then they trembled at the wood and the rock.

‘A god inhabits this grove,’ he said, ‘ and this hill with its leafy summit,

(which god is unknown): my Arcadians believe they have seen

Jove himself, as his right hand has often shaken

his darkening shield, and called up the storm clouds.

Moreover you can see in these two townships

with broken walls, the memorials and relics of men of old.

Father Janus built this fort, Saturn that:

this was named the Janiculum, that the Saturnia.’

Talking among themselves they came to the house

of the impoverished Evander, and saw cattle here and there, lowing

where the Roman Forum and the fashionable Carinae would be.

When they reached the house, Evander said: ‘Victorious Hercules

stooped to entering this doorway, this palace charmed him.

My guest, dare to scorn wealth, and make yourself worthy too

to be a god: don’t be scathing about the lack of possessions.’

He spoke, and led mighty Aeneas beneath the confines

of his sloping roof, and allotted him a mattress

stuffed with leaves, and the pelt of a Libyan bear:

Night fell, and embraced the earth with her darkening wings.

BkVIII:370-406 Venus Seeks Weapons from Vulcan

‘Venus Ordering Arms from Vulcan for Aeneas’ – Jean Restout (France, 1692-1768), LACMA Collections

Now Venus, a mother fearful, and not without reason, in her mind,

troubled by the Laurentine threats, and fierce uprising,

spoke to Vulcan, her husband, in their golden bridal chamber,

beginning this way, breathing divine passion into her words:

‘I didn’t ask weapons of your skill or power, dearest husband,

nor any help for my poor people, while the Argive kings

destroyed doomed Troy in the war, her citadel fated

to fall to hostile flames: no, I didn’t want to exercise

you or your skills in vain, though I owed much indeed

to Priam’s sons, and often wept at Aeneas’s cruel suffering.

Now at Jove’s command he has set foot on Rutulian shores,

so I come likewise as a suppliant and ask arms of the power

sacred to me, a mother on behalf of her son. Thetis, Nereus’s

daughter, and Aurora, Tithonus’s wife, could move you with tears.

See what nations gather, what cities, closing their gates,

are sharpening their swords against me, to destroy my people.’

She had spoken, and as he hesitated, the goddess caressed him

in a tender embrace, on this side and on that, in her snowy arms.

At once he felt the familiar flame, and that warmth he knew

penetrated him to the marrow, and ran through his melting bones,

no differently than when, with a peal of thunder, a forked

streak of fire tears through the storm-clouds with dazzling light:

his partner felt it, delighted with her cleverness and conscious

of her beauty. Then old Vulcan spoke, chained by immortal love:

‘Why do you seek instances from the past? Goddess, where

has your faith in me gone? If your anxiety then was the same,

it would have been right for me too to arm the Trojans then:

neither fate nor the almighty Father refused to let Troy stand,

or Priam live, ten years more. And so now, if war is your intent,

and your mind is set on it, cease to doubt your powers, entreating

whatever care I can promise in my craft, whatever can be made

of iron and molten electrum, whatever fire and air can do.’

Saying these words he gave her a desired embrace, and sinking

onto his wife’s breast, sought gentle sleep in every limb.

BkVIII:407-453 Vulcan’s Smithy

When, in vanishing night’s mid-course, first rest

has conquered the need for sleep: when a woman,

who supports life with distaff and the humble work

Minerva imposes, first wakes the ashes, and slumbering flames,

adding night hours to her toil, and maintains her servants

at their endless task, by lamplight, to keep her husband’s bed

pure, and raise her young sons: just so, the god,

with the power of fire, rose now from his soft bed,

no idler at that hour, to labour at the forge.

An island, its rocks smoking, rises steeply by

the Sicilian coast, near the flanks of Aeolian Lipare.

Beneath it a cave, and the galleries of Etna, eaten at

by the Cyclopean furnaces, resound, and the groans from

the anvils are heard echoing the heavy blows,

and masses of Chalybean steel hiss in the caverns,

and fire breathes through the furnaces. It is Vulcan’s home

and called Vulcania. Here then the god

with the power of fire descended from the heavens.

In the huge cave the Cyclopes, Brontes, Steropes,

and bare-limbed Pyrcamon, were forging iron.

They held a lightning-bolt, shaped with their hands,

like many of those the Father hurls from all over

the sky, part of it polished, part still left to do.

They’d added three shafts of spiralling rain, three of watery

cloud, three of reddening fire, and the winged south wind.

now they were blending terrifying flashes, into the work,

sounds and fears, and fury with following flames.

Elsewhere they pressed on with a chariot for Mars, with winged wheels,

with which he rouses men, with which he rouses cities:

and a chilling aegis, the breastplate of Pallas,

competing to burnish its serpent scales of gold,

its interwoven snakes, and the Gorgon herself

on the goddess’s breast, with severed neck and rolling eyes:

‘Away with all this,’ he shouts, ‘remove the work

you’ve started, Cyclopes of Etna, and turn your minds to this:

you’re to make arms for a brave hero. Now you

need strength, swift hands now, all the art now of a master.

An end to delay.’ He said no more, but they all

bent quickly to the toil, and shared the labour equally.

Bronze and golden ore flowed in streams,

and steel, that deals wounds, melted in a vast furnace.

They shaped a giant shield, one to stand against all

the weapons of Latium, layering it seven times,

disc on disc. Some sucked in air and blew it out

again with panting bellows, others dipped the hissing bronze

in the lake: the cavern groaned beneath the weight of anvils.

With mighty force they lifted their arms together in rhythm,

and turned the mass of metal, gripping it with pincers.

BkVIII:454-519 Evander Proposes Assistance

While the lord of Lemnos hastened the work on the Aeolian

shore, the kindly light, and the dawn song of the birds

beneath the eaves, called Evander from his humble house.

The old man rose, clothed his body in a tunic

and strapped Tyrrhenian sandals to the soles of his feet.

Then he fastened his Tegaean sword over his shoulder

and to his side, flinging back a panther’s hide on the left.

Two guard dogs besides ran ahead from the high

threshold, and accompanied their master’s steps.

The hero made his way to his guest Aeneas’s

secluded lodging, thinking of his words,

and the help he had promised. Aeneas was no less

early to rise: his son Pallas walked with the one,

Achates with the other. They clasped hands as they met,

sat down among the houses, and finally enjoyed

open conversation. The king was the first to begin, so:

‘Greatest leader of the Teucrians, for my part while you’re safe

and sound I’ll never accept that the kingdom and power of Troy

have been overthrown, our strength in war is inadequate to such

a name: on this side we are shut in by the Tuscan river, while on that

the Rutulian presses us, and thunders in arms round our walls.

But I propose to affiliate mighty peoples to you,

and a war-camp rich in kingships, help that chance

unpredictably reveals. You arrive at fate’s command.

Not far from here is the site of Argylla’s city,

built of ancient stone, where the Lydian race,

famous in war, once settled the Etruscan heights.

For many years it flourished, until King Mezentius

ruled it with arrogant power, and savage weaponry.

Why recount the tyrant’s wicked murders and vicious acts?

May the gods reserve such for his life and race!

He even tied corpses to living bodies, as a means

of torture, placing hand on hand and face against face,

so killing by a lingering death, in that wretched

embrace, that ooze of disease and decomposition.

But the weary citizens at last armed themselves

surrounded the atrocious madman in his palace,

mowed down his supporters, and fired the roof.

Amongst the carnage he escaped and fled

to Rutulian soil, protected by Turnus’s allied army.

So all Etruria has risen in rightful anger, demanding

the king for punishment, with the threat of immediate war.

Aeneas, I’ll make you leader of those thousands.

For their ships clamour densely on the shore,

and they order the banners to advance, but an aged

soothsayer holds them back, singing of destiny:

‘O chosen warriors of Maeonia, the flower, the honour

of our ancient race, whom just resentment sends against

the enemy, and whom Mezentius fires with rightful anger,

no man of Italy may control such a people as you: choose

foreigners as leaders.’ So the Etruscan ranks camped

on that plain, fearful of this warning from the gods.

Tarchon himself has sent ambassadors to me, with the royal

sceptre and crown, entrusting me with the insignia:

I to come to the camp, and take the Tuscan throne.

But the slow frost of old age wearied by the years, and strength

now beyond acts of valour, begrudge me the command.

I would urge my son to it, except that of mixed blood

with a Sabine mother, he takes part of his nationality from her.

You, O bravest leader of Trojans and Italians, to whose race

and years destiny is favourable, whom the divine will calls,

accept. Moreover I’ll add Pallas here, our hope and comfort:

let him become accustomed under your guidance

to endure military service, and the grave work of war,

witness your actions, and admire you from his early years.

I’ll grant him two hundred Arcadian horsemen, the choice flower

of our manhood, and Pallas will grant the same to you himself.’

BkVIII:520-584 The Preliminary Alarms

He had scarcely finished, and Aeneas, Anchises’s son,

and loyal Achates, with eyes downcast, were thinking

of many a difficulty, in their own sombre minds,

when Cytherea sent a sign from a cloudless sky.

For lightning came flashing unexpectedly from heaven,

with thunder, and suddenly all seemed to quake,

and, through the air, a Tyrrhenian trumpet blast seemed to bray.

They looked upwards, a great crash sounded again and again.

In a calm region of the sky among the clouds they saw

weapons reddening in the bright air, and heard the noise of blows.

The others were astounded but the Trojan hero knew

the sounds as those of things which his mother had promised.

Then he cried: ‘My friend, indeed, do not wonder I beg you

as to what these marvels might prophesy: I am called

by Olympus. The goddess who bore me foretold

she would send this sign if war was near, and bring

weapons from Vulcan through the air to aid me.

Alas what slaughter awaits the wretched Laurentines!

What a price you’ll pay me, Turnus! What shields and helmets

and bodies of the brave you’ll roll beneath your waves,

father Tiber! Let them ask for battle and break their treaties.’

Having spoken, he raised himself from his high throne,

and firstly revived the dormant altars with Herculean fire,

then gladly visited yesterday’s Lar and the humble

household gods. Evander and the Trojan warriors

equally sacrificed chosen ewes according to the rite.

Next he went to the ships and met again with his comrades,

choosing the most outstanding in courage to follow him

to war: the others slipped downstream, floating effortlessly

on the helpful current, carrying news to Ascanius

of his father and his fortunes. Horses were granted

to the Trojans who were to take the Tyrrhenian field:

They lead out a choice mount for Aeneas, clothed

in a tawny lion’s pelt with gleaming gilded claws.

A rumour suddenly flew through the little town, proclaiming

that horsemen were riding fast to the Tyrrhene king’s shores.

Mothers, in alarm, redoubled their prayers, and fear drew near

with danger, and now the war god’s image loomed larger.

Then old Evander, clasping his son’s hand as he departed,

clung to him weeping incessantly and spoke as follows:

‘O, if Jupiter would bring back the years that have vanished,

I to be as I was when I felled the foremost ranks under Praeneste’s

very walls, and as victor heaped up the shields,

and sent King Erulus down to Tartarus, by this right hand,

he to whom at his birth his mother Feronia (strange to tell)

gave three lives, triple weapons to wield – to be three times

brought low in death: who at last in a moment this right hand

stripped of all his lives, and equally of all his weapons:

I would never be torn as now from your sweet embrace, my son,

never would Mezentius have poured insults on

this neighbour’s head, caused so many cruel deaths

with the sword, or widowed the city of so many of her sons.

But you, powers above, and you, Jupiter, mighty ruler of the gods,

take pity I beg you on this Arcadian king, and hear

a father’s prayer. If your will, and fate, keep my Pallas safe,

if I live to see him and be together with him, I ask for life:

I have the patience to endure any hardship.

But if you threaten any unbearable disaster, Fortune,

now, oh now, let me break the thread of cruel existence,

while fear hangs in doubt, while hope’s uncertain of the future.

while you, beloved boy, my late and only joy, are held

in my embrace, and let no evil news wound my ears.’

These were the words the father poured out at their last parting:

then his servants carried him, overcome, into the palace.

BkVIII:585-625 Venus’s Gift of Armour

And now the horsemen had ridden from the opened gates,

Aeneas, and loyal Achetes, among the first: then the other

princes of Troy, Pallas himself travelling mid-column,

notable in his cloak and engraved armour,

like the Morning-Star, whom Venus loves above all

the other starry fires, when, having bathed in Ocean’s wave,

he raises his sacred head in heaven, and melts the dark.

Mothers stand fearfully on the battlements, and with their eyes

follow the cloud of dust, the squadrons bright with bronze.

The armed men pass through the undergrowth where the route

is most direct: a shout rises, and they form column,

and with the thunder of their hooves shake the broken ground.

There’s a large grove by the chilly stream of Caere, held sacred

far and wide, in ancestral reverence: the hollow hills enclose it

on all sides, and surround the wood with dark fir trees.

The tale is that the ancient Pelasgians, who once held

the Latin borders, dedicated this wood and a festive day

to Silvanus, god of the fields and the herds.

Not far from here, Tarchon and the Tyrrhenians were camped

in a safe place, and now all their troops could be seen,

from the high ground, scattered widely over the fields.

Aeneas, the leader, and the young men chosen for war,

arrived, and refreshed their horses and their weary bodies.

Then Venus, bright goddess, came bearing gifts through

the ethereal clouds: and when she saw her son from far away

who had retired in secret to the valley by the cool stream,

she went to him herself, unasked, and spoke these words:

‘See the gifts brought to perfection by my husband’s

skill, as promised. You need not hesitate, my son, to quickly

challenge the proud Laurentines, or fierce Turnus, to battle.’

Cytherea spoke, and invited her son’s embrace, and placed

the shining weapons under an oak tree opposite.

He cannot have enough of turning his gaze over each item,

delighting in the goddess’s gift and so high an honour,

admiring, and turning the helmet over with hands and arms,

with its fearsome crest and spouting flames,

and the fateful sword, the stiff breastplate of bronze,

dark-red and huge, like a bluish cloud when it’s lit

by the rays of the sun, and glows from afar:

then the smooth greaves, of electrum and refined gold,

the spear, and the shield’s indescribable detail.

BkVIII:626-670 Vulcan’s Shield: Scenes of Early Rome

There the lord with the power of fire, not unversed

in prophecy, and knowledge of the centuries to come,

had fashioned the history of Italy, and Rome’s triumphs:

there was every future generation of Ascanius’s stock,

and the sequence of battles they were to fight.

He had also shown the she-wolf, having just littered,

lying on the ground, in the green cave of Mars,

the twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, playing, hanging

on her teats, and fearlessly sucking at their foster-mother.

Bending her neck back smoothly she caressed them

in turn, and licked their limbs with her tongue.

Not far from that he had placed Rome, the Sabine women,

lawlessly snatched from the seated crowd, when the great games

were held in the Circus: and the sudden surge of fresh warfare

between Romulus’s men, and the aged Tatius and his austere Cures.

Next, the same two kings stood armed in front of Jove’s altar,

holding the wine-cups and joined in league, sacrificing a sow,

the new-built palace bristling with Romulus’s thatch.

Then, not far from that, four-horse chariots driven

in different directions tore Mettus apart (Alban, you should

have kept your word, though!), and Tullus dragged the liar’s

entrails through the woods, the briars wet with sprinkled blood.

There was Porsenna too, ordering Rome to admit the banished

Tarquin, and gripping the city in a mighty siege:

the scions of Aeneas running on the sword for freedom’s sake.

You could see Porsenna in angry, and in threatening, posture,

because Cocles dared to tear down the bridge,

because Cloelia broke her restraints and swam the river.

At the top Manlius, guardian of the Tarpeian Citadel,

stood before the temple, defending the high Capitol.

And there the silvery goose, flying through the gilded

colonnades, cackled that the Gauls were at the gate.

The Gauls were there in the gorse, taking the Citadel,

protected by the dark, the gift of shadowy night.

Their hair was gold, and their clothes were gold,

they shone in striped cloaks, their white necks

torqued with gold, each waving two Alpine javelins

in his hand, long shields defending their bodies.

Here he had beaten out the leaping Salii and naked Luperci,

the woolly priest’s caps, and the oval shields that fell

from heaven, chaste mothers in cushioned carriages

leading sacred images through the city. Far from these

he had added the regions of Tartarus, the high gates of Dis,

the punishment for wickedness, and you Catiline, hanging

from a threatening cliff, trembling at the sight of the Furies:

and the good, at a distance, Cato handing out justice.

BkVIII:671-713 Vulcan’s Shield: The Battle of Actium

The likeness of the swollen sea flowed everywhere among these,

in gold, though the flood foamed with white billows,

and dolphins in bright silver swept the waters

round about with arching tails, and cut through the surge.

In the centre bronze ships could be seen, the Battle of Actium,

and you could make out all Leucate in feverish

preparation for war, the waves gleaming with gold.

On one side Augustus Caesar stands on the high stern,

leading the Italians to the conflict, with him the Senate,

the People, the household gods, the great gods, his happy brow

shoots out twin flames, and his father’s star is shown on his head.

Elsewhere Agrippa, favoured by the winds and the gods

leads his towering column of ships, his brow shines

with the beaks of the naval crown, his proud battle distinction.

On the other side Antony, with barbarous wealth and strange weapons,

conqueror of eastern peoples and the Indian shores, bringing Egypt,

and the might of the Orient, with him, and furthest Bactria:

and his Egyptian consort follows him (the shame).

All press forward together, and the whole sea foams,

churned by the sweeping oars and the trident rams.

They seek deep water: you’d think the Cycladic islands were uprooted

and afloat on the flood, or high mountains clashed with mountains,

so huge the mass with which the men attack the towering sterns.

Blazing tow and missiles of winged steel shower from their hands,

Neptune’s fields grow red with fresh slaughter.

The queen in the centre signals to her columns with the native

sistrum, not yet turning to look at the twin snakes at her back.

Barking Anubis, and monstrous gods of every kind

brandish weapons against Neptune, Venus,

and Minerva. Mars rages in the centre of the contest,

engraved in steel, and the grim Furies in the sky,

and Discord in a torn robe strides joyously, while

Bellona follows with her blood-drenched whip.

Apollo of Actium sees from above and bends his bow: at this

all Egypt, and India, all the Arabs and Sabaeans turn and flee.

The queen herself is seen to call upon the winds,

set sail, and now, even now, spread the slackened canvas.

The lord with the power of fire has fashioned her pallid

with the coming of death, amidst the slaughter,

carried onwards by the waves and wind of Iapyx,

while before her is Nile, mourning with his vast extent,

opening wide his bays, and, with his whole tapestry, calling

the vanquished to his dark green breast, and sheltering streams.

BkVIII:714-731 Vulcan’s Shield: Augustus’s Triple Triumph

Next Augustus, entering the walls of Rome in triple triumph,

is dedicating his immortal offering to Italy’s gods,

three hundred great shrines throughout the city.

The streets are ringing with joy, playfulness, applause:

a band of women in every temple, altars in every one:

before the altars sacrificial steers cover the ground.

He himself sits at the snow-white threshold of shining Apollo,

examines the gifts of nations, and hangs them on the proud gates.

The conquered peoples walk past in a long line, as diverse

in language as in weapons, or the fashion of their clothes.

Here Vulcan has shown the Nomad race and loose-robed Africans,

there the Leleges and Carians and Gelonians with their quivers:

Euphrates runs with quieter waves, and the Morini,

remotest of mankind, the double-horned Rhine,

the untamed Dahae, and Araxes, resenting its restored bridge.

Aeneas marvels at such things on Vulcan’s shield, his mother’s gift,

and delights in the images, not recognising the future events,

lifting to his shoulder the glory and the destiny of his heirs.

24

Horace 1.37

1.37
—-

To drinking now, now all to the nimble foot
that beats the earth, now friends, now at last it’s time
to heap the festive couches deep with
Salian feasts for the gods’ enjoyment.

Before this day, to break out the Caecuban
from our ancestral cellars had been a crime,
while that demented queen was working
havoc to Capitol, death to Empire

with her polluted mob of retainers whom
disease alone made men-unrestrained in all
her impotence of fancied power and
drunk on sweet fortune. But seeing scarcely

a single ship come out of the flames intact
subdued her rage, and Caesar impelled a mind
distraught on Mareotic wine to
tangible terrors, pursuing closely

by oar her flight from Italy, even as
the hawk a gentle dove or the hunter, swift
in chase, a hare across the plains of
snow-mantled Thessaly, keen to put chains

around a monster laden with doom: one who,
intent to die more nobly, had nothing of
a woman’s fear before the sword nor
fled by swift fleet to a secret border,

audacious still to gaze on her humbled court
with tranquil face, and valiant enough to take
the scaly asps in hand, that she might
drink with her body their deadly venom,

ferocious all the more in her studied death;
she was indeed-disdaining to let the fierce
Liburnian ships lead her dethroned to
arrogant triumph–no humble woman.

Selections from Horace’s Odes

Translated by Steven J. Willett (includes a brief biography and annotated bibliography of the poet, and metrical notes).  Translation & notes copyright 1996-1998 by Steven Willett.  All rights reserved. https://diotima-doctafemina.org/translations/latin/selections-from-horaces-odes/

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero
pulsanda tellus; nunc Saliaribus
ornare pulvinar deorum
tempus erat dapibus, sodales.

antehac nefas depromere Caecubum
cellis avitis, dum Capitolio
regina dementis ruinas,
funus et imperio parabat

contaminato cum grege turpium
morbo virorum quidlibet inpotens
sperare fortunaque dulci
ebria. sed minuit furorem

vix una sospes navis ab ignibus
mentemque lymphatam Mareotico
redegit in veros timores
Caesar ab Italia volantem

remis adurgens, accipiter velut
mollis columbas aut leporem citus
venator in campis nivalis
Haemoniae, daret ut catenis

fatale monstrum. quae generosius
perire quaerens nec muliebriter
expavit ensem nec latentis
classe cita reparavit oras.

ausa et iacentem visere regiam
voltu sereno, fortis et asperas
tractare serpentes, ut atrum
corpore conbiberet venenum,

deliberata morte ferocior;
saevis Liburnis scilicet invidens
privata deduci superbo,
non humilis mulier, triumpho.

Horace. Horace, Odes and Epodes. Paul Shorey and Gordon J. Laing. Chicago. Benj. H. Sanborn & Co. 1919.

25

Propertius 3.11

Why wonder [31] that a woman governs my life, and hauls off a man in bondage to her sway? Why do you frame shameful charges of cowardice against me because I cannot burst my bonds and break the yoke? The sailor best predicts the temper of the winds; the soldier has learned from his wounds to feel fear. Words like yours I used to utter in my bygone youth: learn now from my example to be afraid.

The witch of Colchis forced the fire-breathing bulls under a yoke of adamant, sowed the seed of battle for the soil to produce armed warriors, and shut the fierce jaws of the guardian serpent, that the golden fleece might go to Aeson’s halls. Penthesilea, the fierce maid of Maeotis, once dared from horseback to attack the ships of the Greeks with arrows, and when the golden helm was lifted to reveal her face, her shining beauty conquered her male conqueror. Omphale, the Lydian girl who bathed in Gyges’ lake, won such renown for her beauty that he who had set up his pillars in the world he had pacified plucked with his brute hands soft tasks of wool. Semiramis built Babylon, the Persians’ capital, by rearing a solid edifice with wall of brick such that two chariots might be sent against each other along the ramparts and yet not scrape their sides with an axle’s touch; and she channelled the Euphrates through the middle of the citadel she founded and commanded Bactra to bow its head to her sway. Enough, for why should I bring gods and heroes to trial on this account? Jupiter shames himself and his whole house.

What of her who of late has fastened disgrace upon our arms, and, a woman who fornicated even with her slaves, demanded as the price of her shameful union [32] the walls of Rome and the senate made over to her dominion? Guilty Alexandria, land ever ready for treason, and Memphis, so often blood-stained at our cost, where the sand robbed Pompey of his three triumphs, no day shall ever wash you clean of this infamy, Rome. Better had your funeral processed over the Phlegrean fields, or had you been doomed to bow your neck to your father-in-law! [33] To be sure, the harlot queen of licentious Canopus, the one disgrace branded on Philip’s line, dared to pit barking Anubis against our Jupiter and to force the Tiber to endure the threats of the Nile, to drive out the Roman trumpet with the rattling sistrum [34] and with the poles of her barge pursue the beaks of our galleys, to stretch effeminate mosquito-nets on the Tarpeian rock and give judgement amid the arms and statues of Marius. What profit now is it to have broken the axes of that Tarquin whose proud life gave him a title derived from it, had we been fated to bear a woman’s yoke? Sing out your triumph, Rome, and, saved, pray long life for Augustus. Yet you fled to the wandering outlets of the craven Nile—not that your hands received Roman fetters. You endured the sight of your arms bitten by the sacred asps and your limbs channelling the stealthy route of the numbing poison. ‘Having so great a citizen as this, O Rome, you need not have feared me’ [35] : thus spoke even a tongue drenched in ceaseless toping.

The city set high on seven hills which presides over the whole world stands not to be destroyed by human hand. These walls the gods have founded, and these the gods also protect: whilst Caesar lives Rome should hardly fear Jupiter. So what does Scipio’s armada count for now, what Camillus’ standards, or the recent capture of Bosporus by Pompey’s might? What count the spoils won from Hannibal, the trophies of conquered Syphax, and Pyrrhus’ glory shattered at our feet? Curtius by filling a chasm made himself a lasting memorial; spurring his horse Decius broke the enemy’s line; the path of Cocles still tells of the cutting of the bridge, and there is the hero to whom a raven gave his name: Leucadian Apollo will tell of a host turned in flight: one day put an end to a war of such vast array.

But do you, sailor, whether you enter or leave harbour, remember Caesar over all the Ionian sea.

Quid mirare, meam si versat femina vitam
et trahit addictum sub sua iura virum,
criminaque ignavi capitis mihi turpia fingis,
quod nequeam fracto rumpere vincla iugo?
ventorum melius praesagit navita morem,
vulneribus didicit miles habere metum.
ista ego praeterita iactavi verba iuventa:
tu nunc exemplo disce timere meo.
Colchis flagrantis adamantina sub iuga tauros
egit et armigera proelia sevit humo,
custodisque feros clausit serpentis hiatus,
iret ut Aesonias aurea lana domos.
ausa ferox ab equo quondam oppugnare sagittis
Maeotis Danaum Penthesilea rates;
aurea cui postquam nudavit cassida frontem,
vicit victorem candida forma virum.
Omphale in tantum formae processit honorem,
Lydia Gygaeo tincta puella lacu,
ut, qui pacato statuisset in orbe columnas,
tam dura traheret mollia pensa manu.
Persarum statuit Babylona Semiramis urbem,
ut solidum cocto tolleret aggere opus,
et duo in adversum mitti per moenia currus
nec possent tacto stringere ab axe latus;
duxit et Euphraten medium, quam condidit, arcis,
iussit et imperio subdere Bactra caput.
nam quid ego heroas, quid raptem in crimina divos?
Iuppiter infamat seque suamque domum.
quid, modo quae nostris opprobria nexerit armis,
et, famulos inter femina trita suos,
coniugii obsceni pretium Romana poposcit
moenia et addictos in sua regna Patres?
noxia Alexandria, dolis aptissima tellus,
et totiens nostro Memphi cruenta malo,
tris ubi Pompeio detraxit harena triumphos–
tollet nulla dies hanc tibi, Roma, notam.
issent Phlegraeo melius tibi funera campo,
vel tua si socero colla daturus eras.
scilicet incesti meretrix regina Canopi,
una Philippeo sanguine adusta nota,
ausa Iovi nostro latrantem opponere Anubim,
et Tiberim Nili cogere ferre minas,
Romanamque tubam crepitanti pellere sistro,
baridos et contis rostra Liburna sequi,
foedaque Tarpeio conopia tendere saxo,
iura dare et statuas inter et arma Mari!
quid nunc Tarquinii fractas iuvat esse secures,
nomine quem simili vita superba notat,
si mulier patienda fuit? cane, Roma, triumphum
et longum Augusto salva precare diem!
fugisti tamen in timidi vaga flumina Nili:
accepere tuae Romula vincla manus.
bracchia spectasti sacris admorsa colubris,
et trahere occultum membra soporis iter.
‘Non hoc, Roma, fui tanto tibi cive verenda!’
dixit et assiduo lingua sepulta mero.
septem urbs alta iugis, toto quae praesidet orbi,
non humana deicienda manu.
haec di condiderunt, haec di quoque moenia servant:
vix timeat salvo Caesare Roma Iovem.
nunc ubi Scipiadae classes, ubi signa Camilli,
aut modo Pompeia, Bospore, capta manu?
Hannibalis spolia et victi monumenta Syphacis,
et Pyrrhi ad nostros gloria fracta pedes?
Curtius expletis statuit monumenta lacunis,
admisso Decius proelia rupit equo,
Coclitis abscissos testatur semita pontes,
est cui cognomen corvus habere dedit:
Leucadius versas acies memorabit Apollo:
tanti operis bellum sustulit una dies.
at tu, sive petes portus seu, navita, linques,
Caesaris in toto sis memor Ionio.

26

Haley, Shelley. 1993. “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-Membering, Re-Claiming, Re-Empowering.”

Black Feminist Thought
and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering

Shelley P. Haley

In Feminist Theory and the Classics, edited by Nancy Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin. New York: Routledge.

I. Re-membering

The questions that first occurred to me when I began to think about this volume on feminist theory and classics were whether there is a role for classics in Black feminist thought and whether there is a role for Black feminist thought in classics. Obviously, I believe the answer to each question is yes, since I am a Black feminist and a classicist. A classicist and feminist, Marilyn Skinner (1987), suggests that the “cultural solidarity” among classicists is comparable to the “race solidarity” among Black feminists. Can Black feminism contribute more to classics than the lessons of solidarity? My Black feminist consciousness answers a resounding yes. There are lessons of re-claiming and re-membering, of giving a voice to ancestors whose life experience has been suppressed and distorted.

But I also have the consciousness of a classicist. As a classicist, I realize that I must validate the existence of ancient African women in accordance with the rigid criteria of documentary evidence upon which my discipline insists. I have seen the contempt classicists have for the work of Van Sertima (1984), James (1954), and Diop (1974), and I do not want to suffer that disrespect. Furthermore, I am, at times painfully, aware that classics is emblematic of White privilege, and the contempt for these Black scholars is part and parcel of that. The discipline (the very word conveys rigidity) of classics still follows the model designed for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century White American gentlemen of independent means. The role of classics in the history of European and American education and the prestige attached to it have led to its self-concept as an elite family of true scholars. Skinner (1987) describes this construction and its ramifications for White feminists. She explores the notion that classics is a family and her vision of family is that of a European, patriarchal and nuclear one. While Skinner’s view is justified, she never takes into account the standpoint of those of us who consider this type of family dysfunctional. No thought is given to those of us

24

who have experienced woman-centered family structures. The idea that we are one big happy family renders the issue of race virtually invisible. Consequently, like many southern American families—indeed, like the biracial couple which keeps their marriage and children a secret (New York Times, December 2, 1991, p. 1)-the classics family has kept its Brown, Black, and biracial ancestors, sisters, and brothers marginalized and invisible.

My experience as a member of a woman-centered family, and as a Black feminist and a classicist, has resulted in what has been expressed best by Patricia Williams (1991). She relates (Williams 1991: 6) how one employer described her being Black and female as at “”oxymoronic odds”” with the status of a commercial lawyer. She isn’t happy with this particular characterization, but she admits that “”my attempts to write in my own voice have placed me in the center of a snarl of social tensions and crossed boundaries”” (Williams 1991: 6). Think of the possibilities in my case: feminist classicist and woman classicist , Black classicist and Black woman classicist, and Black feminist and Black feminist classicist. If oxymoronic odds came in degrees, I would be somewhere near the high end. How did I come to this location as a Black feminist classicist?

Questions of gender and sexism had never been an issue for me, even within my family. My family has followed our Iroquois and West African heritage: the woman sets policy and shares in decisions. My father, Charles (“”Pete””) Tracy Haley, turned his pay over to my mother, and after she died, to his mother. This isn’t to say my father didn’t assimilate certain patriarchal values. He was the first in his family to attend college; he did so during the depression, and racism drove him to alcoholism. He graduated from Syracuse University in 1937, “”thank the laudy,”” as he used to say. He wanted one of his sons to follow him to Syracuse. When I was admitted (neither of my brothers applied), he was proud but refused to pay my expenses. “”Women don’ t need a college education,”” he said. My reaction was “” I’ll show him,”” and I proceeded to get a Ph.D. in classics. I never did disabuse him of the notion that I didn’t need the education. In many ways, my father’s standpoint was framed by what he had experienced. The women in our family had always had jobs: my grandmother was a cook , my mother was a secretary. My aunts (my father’s sisters) had office and sales positions. None of these women had had a college education. So, to my father’s way of thinking, they didn’t need one. However, it was my grandmother who encouraged me to go as far as I could in education . She had always wanted to be a teacher, but had to leave school at the age of twelve to support her family. I don’t think my father ever knew how deeply my grandmother had wanted to go to a teacher’s training college.

Like my fellow classicists, I was trained in the Anglo-Germanic tradition of the discipline. I took Latin in high school in upstate New York, continued it at Syracuse, never intending it as a major but always finding it a source of strength and wonder: I was good at it. Nowadays when people ask me how I became interested in classics, I always say truthfully that it was the only subject in high

25

school where I did not have to argue with the teacher. I had a social studies teacher who informed our class that Africa and Asia contributed nothing to human civilization. I had an American History teacher who proclaimed to the class that Puerto Rico would never become a state because it wasn’t Anglo-Saxon in background. When I challenged him with the example of Hawaii, I was sent to the principal’s office for “impertinence.” I spent much time in the principal’s office, but never for impertinence in Latin class. It seemed so straightforward; there was nothing to argue about. In college, elementary education was my intended goal, but boredom set in , and I was drawn back to Latin and, more and more, to Roman history.  I took Greek and French; I applied to graduate schools; and I won a Danforth Fellowship. As an undergraduate taking classics, I wanted to belong, to be part of that select group who studied Latin and Greek.  As I look back on it now, I suppose I liked the feeling of being special and exotic. I enjoyed thumbing my nose at my peers who suggested I would do more for my people if I enrolled in journalism or broadcasting. Those were vocational courses; I was an intellectual.

It has only been in the last few years that I have rediscovered the Black feminists of the nineteenth century who could have served as my role models.  Frances Jackson Coppin was a slave whose aunt saved the money ($123.00) to buy her freedom. She went on to obtain a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1865 and taught Latin and Greek to African-Americans in Philadelphia.  Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell were members of the Oberlin class of 1884 and they too received B .A.s . The curriculum for this degree was classical and usually
taken by men only; for that reason it was called the ” gentlemen’s course.”  Women took the “ladies”‘ course, a two-year literary curriculum, which led to a certificate.  Both Cooper and Terrell went on to teach Latin at the M Street school in Washington , D.C. Terrell highlights the racist assumptions of inferiority prevalent during her life in her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World (1940) . She relates this incident:

One day Matthew Arnold, the English writer, visited our class and Professor Frost asked me both to read the Greek and then to translate. After leaving the class Mr . Arnold referred to the young lady who read the passage of Greek so well. Thinking it would interest the Englishman, Professor Frost told him I was of African descent. Thereupon Mr. Arnold expressed the greatest surprise imaginable, because, he said, he thought the tongue of the African was so thick he could not be taught to pronounce the Greek correctly (Terrell 1940: 41). 1

Coppin , Cooper, and Terrell viewed classics as a challenge , a concrete way to disprove the prevailing racist and sexist stereotypes of their times. They were educators , intellectual s , and social activists. Each believed that education was the key to overthrowing the disadvantages that Black women and men faced and

26

still face. Since a classical education was the yardstick for intellectual capability, Coppin, Cooper, and Terrell learned classics, that microcosm of their society where Black women were silenced and thought incapable of intellectual endeavor. That learning, in turn, had a symbolic value for them. Audre Lorde (1984: 112) has written that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. ” 2

While that may be true, Coppin, Cooper, and Terrell chipped away at the racist and sexist foundation of the master’s house. Classics, the measure of intellectual supremacy, was transformed by them into a tool of resistance. But I , their daughter on a metaphorical level, must face the fact that they did not consider themselves classicists. They studied Latin and Greek and excelled; in this regard they are my foremothers and role models . But the social constraints of their time pushed them out of the academy and strengthened their commitment to social activism. 3 At the same time, their very education made this commitment vulnerable. As Mary Helen Washington has stated (Washington 1988 : xxx), “To counteract the prevailing assumptions about black women as immoral and ignorant, Cooper had to construct a narrator who was aware of the plight of uneducated women but was clearly set apart from them in refinement, intelligence and training.” The same can be said of Terrell ; classics was a key to the construction of this distance. These women’s experience has encouraged me to examine the sociology and history of the discipline . Sociologically, my experience with classics mirrors theirs.

It was at the University of Michigan that the structure and implications of patriarchal education struck me. The hierarchy and competition that characterized the program resulted in dehumanizing groveling. The hierarchy was marked by a progression of nomenclature. Entering graduate students were called by their last names; second and third year students who had passed exams were called Miss or Mr. Those admitted to candidacy were called by their first names. Male faculty were always addressed as Mr. __ , after the Harvard model. There was one woman on the faculty when I was there and she was ” Mrs .” I noticed, though, that while male faculty in conversation with students would refer to their colleagues as “Mr. __ ,” their female colleague was “Gerda.” Humiliation was used to “separate the men from the boys“; the aim of one professor was to reduce female students to tears. I accepted the hierarchical nomenclature but I drew the line at humiliation. When I stood up to the tears-inducing professor, I acquired the reputation of a “militant” and a “tough cookie.”

There was racism. One professor at a social function pointedly told other faculty members within my hearing that Black students were “lousy at Latin” and just not smart enough to take classics. The chair asked me why Blacks were afraid of intellectual disciplines and always went into sociology or education. Another announced during a public lecture that there was no such thing as a “Black classicist.” I was told in my second year (I was still Haley) that the dean of the graduate school was under the impression that there were no Black graduate students in the department. I was ordered by the chair of the department to attend

27

a departmental colloquium at which the dean would be present so “he could see a brown face.” I didn’t go, even though the subject was one I was interested in. I tended to internalize the anger; my attempts at official complaints were always met with, “That’s a serious accusation; can you prove it?” What really annoyed me was that the class hierarchy was internalized and perpetuated by the graduate students themselves. First year students could not socialize with doctoral candidates, or second-years or third-years. Likewise, second-years socialized only with second-years and so on. Students who had passed through qualifying exams (taken at the end of the second year) felt themselves superior to those who failed or had not yet taken them. They resorted to a sort of bullying and intimidation.

A group of students established an informal but exclusive discussion group with a selected faculty member; it was held at the University Club. Student participation was by invitation only and not all students were invited. I, two Jewish men, and an Asian-American man never received an invitation. We referred to this discussion group, always highly publicized, but not public, as the “country club.” The group ended when a professor learned that not all students were invited and refused to participate until the group was open to all. Significantly , the main organizers of these discussion groups were two White women, who today consider themselves feminists.

Despite this evidence to the contrary, I continued to believe that classics was the great equalizer. In my mind, these instances of racism were committed by individuals; it wasn‘t the discipline that was racist. I knew stories from my history about slaves, fugitive slaves, and newly emancipated people who learned Latin and Greek and were very successful. My own mother and aunts and father knew Latin and had encouraged me when I started it in high school. Anyone who could master Latin and Greek was equal and was playing on a level and even field. At Michigan when the professor said, “There is no such thing as a Black classicist,” I heard, “we’re all classicists .” Yes, I thought, aren‘t I lucky to be in such an egalitarian field.

Yet, throughout my college and graduate school experience, buried deep in the recesses of my mind was the voice of my grandmother, Ethel Clemons Haley, saying, “Remember, no matter what you learn in school, Cleopatra was black.” Now where did she get an idea like that? Schooled only as far as the seventh grade, never having learned any foreign language, just a domestic servant, a cook, she obviously had no knowledge about Cleopatra or classics or anything else intellectual . So I, the great teacher, used to tell her about the Ptolemies and how they were Greek and how Cleopatra was a Ptolemy and so she was Greek.

At one point I even showed her the genealogical tables of the Cambridge Ancient History. “See,” I said, “Cleopatra was Greek!” ” Oh,” she said, “and who wrote those books?” I dismissed her question with exasperation and returned to the study of the ancient sources, confident that what I had been taught to see was indeed what was there to be seen.

28

I was not very enthusiastic about feminism or feminist theory. I was much like the Black women bell hooks (1981) describes in Ain ‘t I a Woman? What is the fuss? All the women in my family had worked, had careers, had families, and balanced everything just fine. They were the center of everything. So the “women’s
movement” left me bored. About this time in the academy, there was a rising
interest in women’s history. Classics, rather cautiously, established courses on
women in the ancient world; the field found some validation when, in 1975,
Sarah Pomeroy published Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in
Classical Antiquity. As I completed graduate school, I was drawn to this new
specialty but investigated it secretly . I still yearned for the approval of classicists
and I believed in loyalty to the discipline’s traditional limits. I saw how classicists
at Michigan spurned Marxist treatments of ancient history and how African and
African-American historians like James and Diop were ignored. In fact I never
even heard of George James until I went to teach at Howard University in 1978,
although Stolen Legacy has been published in 1954. I knew the application of
any critical theory to “our” discipline was tantamount to betrayal. I remember
making a weak vow at the APA, along with rather more vociferous female
colleagues and peers, that I would never teach such a course. Classics was a
universally relevant discipline; it was timeless and it didn’t need to change. Did
it?

It was a weak vow, and in my second year at Howard, I found myself teaching
“Women in the Ancient World.” As I look back at the syllabus now, it was not
particularly feminist; it was a classics survey, Homer, the tragedians , Livy ,
Vergil, with a few women thrown in. The feminist literature I assigned was not
particularly current or radical. 5 I didn’t relate to it personally but found places
for it in my course. The only women in Africa I dealt with were Dido and
Cleopatra, but I didn’t regard them as Black, or African.

It was Cleopatra who haunted me. In a “Women in the Ancient World” class,
we were studying Cleopatra and Octavian’ s propaganda against her. Ray, a Black
male student, asked me to cover again the arguments identifying Cleopatra as a
Greek. I sighed and presented all the evidence. I pulled out the Cambridge
Ancient History (CAH), and we pored over the genealogy. I brought in the
research of my colleague Frank Snowden (1970) . We reviewed other secondary
sources: Volkmann (1958), Grant (1972, 1982), and Lindsay (1971). Ray, very
politely but intently, repeated the question my grandmother had posed years
before: “But Professor Haley, who wrote those books?” I was going through it
all again (growing somewhat irate), when I stared at the CAH genealogy and
saw–for the first time– question marks where Cleopatra’s grandmother should
be. As I stared, I heard Ray, again politely, say, “I understand, Professor Haley.
You believe what you say is true, but you have bought a lie.” The other students
in the class were divided; some agreed with Ray, some with me, others were
totally indifferent. I was shaken; what did those question marks mean? Why

29

didn’t all the students see the evidence as I did? What did they know that I didn’t?
In buying the lie, had I sold out my race?

At that point, I confronted Cleopatra, and I discovered that my Black students
and indeed my grandmother read her on a different level. For them and for me,
although I suppressed her, Cleopatra was the lost and found window where we
could “claim an identity they taught us to despise” (Cliff 1988: 61 ). I had disliked
discussing Cleopatra; I had been uncomfortable and ill at ease. Why? I began to
see and still am arriving at seeing that Cleopatra is the crystallization of the
tension between my yearning to fit in among classicists and my identity politics.
I clouded this tension by professing that the Ptolemies of the first century B.C.E.
were Greco-Egyptian. To me, “Egyptian”, “Greco-Egyptian, ” “Greek,” “Roman”
had been cultural designations. I refused, rather self-righteously, I admit, to
colorize the question as my grandmother had done , along with my students, and,
most recently , Newsweek (“Was Cleopatra Black” : September 23, 1991). What
I resisted was the fact that my culture is colorized: Black literature, Black music,
Black art, Black feminism. Gradually, by reading my history and Black feminist
thought , I perceived that Cleopatra was a signifier on two levels . 6 She gives
voice to our “anxiety about cultural disinheritance” (Sadoff 1990: 205), and she
represents the contemporary Black woman’s double history of oppression and
survival.

In the Black oral tradition, Cleopatra becomes a symbolic construction voicing
our Black African heritage so long suppressed by racism and the ideology of
miscegenation . When we say, in general, that the ancient Egyptians were Black
and, more specifically, that Cleopatra was Black, we claim them as part of a
culture and history that has known oppression and triumph, exploitation and
survival. Cleopatra reacted to the phenomena of oppression and exploitation as
a Black woman would . Hence we embrace her as sister; she is Black. Alice
Walker (1989: 267) employs a similar symbolic construction with Medusa . Here
Medusa’s decapitation by Perseus represents the rape and cultural suppression of
Africa by Europeans.

My grandmother and students were also reading Cleopatra on the level of their
experience with miscegenation and the law of miscegenation (Saks 1988). We
had been told that if we have one Black ancestor, then we are Black. Films and
plays have reinforced this idea. Our family histories and photographs proved this
to us. My grandmother was white, had straight black hair, and the nose of her
Onondagan grandmother, but she was “colored.” Even as a “Greco-Egyptian, ”
Cleopatra was a product of miscegenation. 7 How is it she is not Black? My
grandmother and students were being logical; they were applying to Cleopatra
the social decoding typically applied to them.

It seemed to me that the Cleopatra I studied as the “true Cleopatra” was a
construction of classical scholars and the Greek and Roman authors they consulted.
8 In this particular case, they were willing–eager-to erase the Black

30

ancestor and claim the beautiful Cleopatra for Europe. Like the biracial family
cited earlier, classics has kept Cleopatra’s Africanity and Blackness a secret and
questionable. Many African-Americans did the same for themselves. My family
claimed the West Indies as our point of origin. Shame arising from internalized
racism never let us go further back until the rise of the Black pride movement .
Sadoffs (1990) analysis and critique of misreading led me to apply this theory
to classics and Cleopatra. 9 Classicists and historians have misread Cleopatra as
a way of furthering ideas of racial purity and hegemony . Martin Bemal’s work
( 1987) on the demise of ancient Egypt in classical scholarship brought him to the
conclusion that we classicists still work within racist paradigms . ‘8

I applied the same critique to the ancient evidence; l began to wonder how the
Romans and Greeks misread Cleopatra. I did research on foreign women and
their image in Roman history and literature . Here Cleopatra was the archetype of
the temptress and she was transformed into other characters : Dido in poetry and
Sophoniba in historiography . 11 The Romans misread these women as exempla of
the temptress who distracted men from their “manliness,” virtus. As strong queens
of African kingdoms, they also constituted a grave threat to the Roman concept
of empire. Black feminists, especially King (1988) and Collins (1990), discuss
in their work the controlling image of the jezebel/seductress and its impact
on the perception and treatment of Black women . Palmer (1983) analyzes the
symbolism of Black women in America as sexual enticers who could overthrow
reason and social order. She relates this to the virgin/whore dualism in cultural
imagery for White women, in existence at least since classical Greece (Palmer
1983: 157).

This same symbol-making process has led to a physical stereotype , which has
been applied to ancient African women even by twentieth-century scholars . A
good example is Frank Snowden ‘ s translation of the physical description of
Scybale, an African woman who appears in the Moretum (a short Augustan poem
of unknown authorship):

Erat unica custos
Afra genus, tota patriam testante figura ,
torta comam labroque tumens et fusca colore,
pectore lata iacens mammis, compressior alvo,
cruribus exilis , spatiosa prodiga planta
(Moretum 31-35) .
African in race, her whole figure proof of her country-her hair tightly
curled , lips thick, color dark , chest broad , breasts pendulous, belly
somewhat pinched, legs thin , and feet broad and ample (translated by
Snowden 1970: 6).

Snowden’ s translation reminds me too much of the physical stereotype of Black
women in the nineteenth century . He does not treat this passage elsewhere in his

31

work, nor does he seem aware that his translation is stereotypical. Can we read
the Latin another way? It seems to me that here is a place where classicists can
use a Black feminist perspective and Black feminism can rehabilitate the reading
of a text. What would a Black feminist translation of this passage look like? Still
using a standard Latin lexicon, here’s what I came up with:

She was his only companion,
African in her race, her whole form a testimony to her country :
her hair twisted into dreads, her lips full , her color dark, her
chest broad, her breasts flat, her stomach flat and firm, her legs
slender, her feet broad and ample.

From this translation, it is clearer that the Roman author was relaying somatic
differences, but without the racist stigma attached to Snowden’s phrases (“thick
lips, pendulous breasts, belly somewhat pinched”). The woman is not portrayed
as beautiful in Roman terms , but neither is she the object of a racist gaze. She
is exotic, as most non-Roman peoples were to the Romans. Black feminist thought
encourages us classicists to acknowledge our own racist and sexist attitudes , not
just those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . It prompts us to reevaluate
our work. This in turn can lead to opening up a space in which to reclaim and
reconstruct the lives of Black women who have been silenced through a dearth
of evidential voice. Black feminist· thought and ideology , with their focus on
inclusivity, can provide the theoretical framework to read the silences that classics
has to offer.

II. Re-claiming

In this part of the essay, I’d like to continue my journey by giving examples
of how I have attempted to follow through the Black feminist model of inclusivity.
12 Here I was, trained in Anglo-German methodology, a product of the
Michigan department, a Black feminist classicist . In 1985, I left Howard to take
a “Target of Opportunity” (TOP) position in the classics department at University
of California, Irvine, a position I held until 1989. The overwhelming Whiteness
and conservatism of that department left me isolated; my colleagues never let me
forget that I was a TOP hire . To maintain my self-esteem and my sanity, I read
and was deeply moved by bell hooks (1981), Audre Lorde (1984), and Elizabeth
Spelman (1982 ; 1988). I was shaken by Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly”
(Lorde 1984: 66-71), because it could have been written to me . I didn’t at the
time know any of the goddesses to whom she refers; I didn’t know there were
Dahomeian Amazons or women-warriors of Dan; I didn’t even know where these
places were. I looked again at my course syllabus : there was a passing reference
to the Code of Hammurabi. Well, I thought, it’ s not Greece. But where are
the African women : Egyptian, Nubian, Ethiopian? None. But wait, there is

32

Cleopatra-again. But I wanted to know of women before the coming of the
Ptolemies. Could I find out?

I felt overwhelmed by the seeming hopelessness of the task, and reacted like
many of my fellow classicists: “I don ‘ t have time for this.” “I don’t know where
to look .” ‘Tm not an Egyptologist.” “There isn’t any evidence.” ” Why do I have
to do this?” But if I don’t, who will? I decided it was up to me; I began by
incorporating ancient Egyptian women in my “Women in the Ancient World”
course.

I approached the subject like a classicist. First I read general surveys and
handbooks on ancient Egypt: Erman (1894), Aldred (1961), Emery (1961), James
(1979). Through these men , I saw ancient Egypt as a Mediterranean culture
whose nature was intrinsically patriarchal. Like a well-trained classicist, I found
myself uncritically accepting the interpretation of these experts . I kept overlooking
the cultural and patriarchal assumptions of these scholars and their predecessors.
Finally , my Black feminist consciousness got through to me. It nagged me to
look critically at these sources. I found that the issue of race was often ignored.
Very early works strove to strip the Egyptians of their Black African culture and
physical features. They ignored the mixed racial heritage and minimized into
invisibility the African features of Egyptian culture. Early Egyptologists often
achieved this by employing taxonomic distinctions between Egyptians and “negroes.”
Punt, a country now identified with Somalia, is often characterized as
mysterious and , along with Nubia, is cited as the home of “negroes,” implying
that no Blacks lived in Egypt. 13 Gender , too, is virtually ignored ; when it is not,
remarkable comments are made. For example, Erman (1894: 150) has this to say:

It has often been said that the essential difference between the civilization
of the West and of the East consists in the different status of
woman. In the West she is the companion of man, in the East his
servant and his toy . In the West, at one time, the esteem in which
woman was held rose to a cult , while in the East the question has been
earnestly discussed whether women really belonged to the human race.

The contrast would come as a surprise to the reader of Aristotle (Politics 1254b3-
1277b25; 1313b33-39; 1335a8-17), who opposes women, slaves, children , and
animals to men, masters , fathers , and human beings.

Were there sources which acknowledged the Africanity and Blackness of the
ancient Egyptians? What was the role of gender in the society? I consulted more
sources, in which Africanity along with Semitic influence emerged as factors in
ancient Egyptian culture. 14 For the role of women and gender, I had to find other
works that dealt with these issues. Lesko ( 1978) provided me with evidence of
female pharaohs and led me to the construction of the pharaohship as a partnership. Lesko (1987: 45) remarks in passing that matrilineage was common in

33

African society . She hints again at this stance in her later work ( Lesko 1989:
313). It appears that except in unusual circumstances there were two pharaohs ,
co-pharaohs , one male and one female , reflecting the androgyny of the Creator.
We have the names of many of these female co-pharaohs, especially from the
Old Kingdom (Lesko 1978: 32). I learned the names of female pharaohs who ruled
alone : Hetepheres ll in the Old Kingdom; Hatshepsut, Twosre, and Mutnodjme in
the New. Troy ( 1986) convinced me of the importance of androgyny, of the
feminine principle, and of motherhood in Egyptian religion and monarchy.
Here, I thought, was a society where some women enjoyed high status and
power and equality. Lesko (1989) reinforced this further. There were still doubts,
though . I wondered whether “pharaoh” was a gender specific term. I kept reading
about African society but the perspective was European. Even Van Sertima ( 1984)
has a Eurocentric focus. Reading Van Sertima, I reacted very much as a classicist,
embarrassed by the lack of evidence and credible references: Cleopatra’s Blackness
is supported by a citation of “Ripley ‘s Believe It or Not” from 1934 . Now
I ask myself whether this is ” poor” scholarship or support for my thesis that we
African Americans misread Cleopatra symbolically.

Throughout my search for ancient African women , I was swayed by Western
feminism, which claimed sexism and women ‘ s oppression cut beyond all racial
and cultural boundaries . This feminist argument reaches back to the fundamental
purpose and function of the patriarchal family, which limited women’s social
roles to being childbearers and homemakers. Certainly ancient Egypt could be
viewed through that lens and could be interpreted as a similar patriarchal structure:
women stayed at home with children; during the New Kingdom , women were
sometimes depicted in art as smaller than men ; the titles of ruling women are
translated as great royal wife, not pharaoh . There seemed to be a contradiction:
were Egyptian women somehow equal at the same time that they were limited to
the roles of childbearers and homemakers?

I didn’t realize what was wrong until I read further. As I considered Gae
Callender’s 1984 essay, “The Status of Women in Old and Early Middle Kingdom
Egypt,” it struck me that she and I had looked at ancient Egypt from a Eurocentric
and Western feminist perspective, not an Afrocentric and Black feminist one.
For example, Callender has, unfortunately, assimilated the racist attitudes of her
sources. My rudimentary knowledge of ancient Egypt tells me that of all the
historical periods , the Old Kingdom (3100-2180 B.C.E .) deviates the least from
the predynastic people who were Black African . Yet Callender (1984 : 34) includes
the following in her discussion of the scholarship concerning Queen Nitikrity:
“Her colorful story [Hall] divided up between a male ruler (about whom nothing
is known by the way) and a Greek courtesan called Rhodopis, together with the
blond e-haired Queen we looked at earlier, Hetepheres” (my emphasis). My initial
reaction to this blonde hair was not as a scholar, but as an African-American
woman. “Here we go again, another White scholar telling me the Egyptians were
White-and not even being subtle!” In a more scholarly vein, I reflected that

34

Callender’s article is not about the physical anthropology of the Old Kingdom
Egyptians ; hence the insertion of this physical trait is curious and suspicious,
especially since there is no supporting evidence cited . There are racist overtones
here. Coming as it does after Callender’s praise of Hetepheres as a queen
(Callender 1984: 32), Callender seems to make an implicit connection between
Hetepheres’ “nordic” traits and her success as a queen . This is reminiscent of the
racist theory of the dynastic people who came down from the north bringing
civilization to the “savage” Egyptians.

It was then I realized how much I had assimilated Western feminism, and how
important it was for me to look to Africa and African feminism. 15 It seemed to
me that African feminism and the African construction of gender are more
applicable to ancient Egypt than is Western feminism, especially if we want to
see Egypt as an African society . The fundamental thesis of the Black feminist
approach here is in Omolade’s words (1980: 240) that ” Black women and men
in traditional African societies were conscious human beings who designed and
constructed their own societies to meet their defined human needs .” There is no
universal construction of gender to describe this subjectivity.

Obviously, I can’t expound here all the similarities between African constructions
of gender and those of ancient Egypt. However, as an example I would like
to examine briefly the role and status of motherhood and language in the Yoruba
and lgbo societies, keeping in mind, of course, the impact of colonialism upon
these societies. I can then set these alongside Egypt and show the similarities
among them.

Among the Yoruba and Igbo, there is sex role differentiation ; people clearly
have designated roles and tasks . Women are traders ; men are hunters. Women
are mothers ; men are fathers. But this differentiation is not dichotomized into
domestic and public spheres. “To be a good wife and mother, a woman had not
only to cook and attend her husband and children, but she also had to farm, trade
or otherwise contribute to her household ‘ s livelihood” (Sudarkasa 1981: 54).
Likewise , men had domestic chores like participating in the socialization of
children, as well as a public occupation. Women participated in decision making ;
they could own property and accumulate wealth from their work. Sudarkasa
( 1981: 54) states that the “important economic roles of women in traditional West
Africa were part and parcel of the overall domestic roles of wife, mother , sister,
and daughter.” The same was true for women in ancient Egypt (Lesko 1978,
1989).

Yoruba women’s greatest authority comes from motherhood, a sign to many
Western feminists of oppression. Troy (1986) delineates the importance of the
mother in Egyptian society both mythically and historically. Hence Yoruba
society, like ancient Egyptian society, is mother centered, and here motherhood
is collective . Marriage is organized around production and reproduction, not the
control of sexuality. It is important to point out also that among the Yoruba and
other peoples of West Africa, “domestic groups are extended families built around

35

segments of matri- or patrilineages” (Sudarkasa 1981: 52). For the Yoruba, it is
the lineage which is important, not the individual or even individual families.
This was also true for the ancient Egyptians . As Diop (1978 : 34) states: “In
those primitive ages when the security of the group was the primary concern, the
respect enjoyed by either of the sexes was connected with its contribution to this
collective security.” In addition, lineage was important , especially in the royal
family where matrifocality insured connections with the goddesses (Troy 1986:
56).

For the Yoruba and Igbo, both males and females have roles of authority
within the domestic groups or compounds . Both these societies have developed
a seniority system based on age as the primary mode of social organization .
Consequently within the compound there are an official male head and female
head. This is strikingly reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian pharaohship. In
ancient Egypt , as in Yoruba society, motherhood was as much a generational
role as a gender role . Women and men related to each other as members of one
family . Hence the ancient Egyptian women viewed all men as their brothers ; men
viewed all women as their sisters . The feminine prototype was that of the mother.
As such this prototype was the medium of renewal and is given symmetrical
expression in the generational roles of mother , wife, sister, and daughter . As Isis
says to Osiris: ” I am your sister. I am your wife. I am the daughter of your mother
who causes your beautiful face to see” (Troy 1986: 50). The double role of
mother/daughter is the primary characteristic of the feminine prototype: she
creates the very being by whom she herself has been created.

This mother-centered construction can include men and in both ancient Egyptian
and Yoruba society the public and private spheres overlap for men just as
they do for women. As a result, for example, men are actively involved in the
care of children. Some feminists might argue that there is still a patriarchal cast
to Yoruba and Igbo society. The chiefs are men and there can be paternal
dominance in the family . One has to wonder how much of this is the result of
colonialism. Omolade (1980: 249) correctly reminds us, however, that “the
crucial aspect here is not an assertion that African women were liberated in the
context of industrialized twentieth century societies, but whether they were citizens
with political rights and economic freedoms.”

Language provides a further key to the Yoruba construction of gender. In the
Yoruba language, there are terms for mother, father, wife, husband, sibling,
child. There is no equivalent for men, women, sister, brother, daughter, or son.
In Igbo, Amadiume (1987 : 89) states that there is no distinction made between
male and female in subject pronouns, that is, there is no “she”/”he.” Her thesis
is that there is a greater possibility for men and women to share attributes.
For sources written in hieroglyphics, I have had to rely on translations undertaken
by academics trained in languages which are rigidly gendered. I have
already raised the question of whether the tenn “pharaoh” is gender specific.
Diop (in Mokhtar 1990: 28-32) attempted to show the linguistic affinity between

36

the hieroglyphics and the Wolof language, but he was not looking specifically at
gender construction. Troy (1986 : 104) observes that “ancient Egyptian is known
for its lack of an extensive kinship terminology .” It seems to cover member s of
the nuclear family: mother, mwt; father, yt; sister, snt; brother, sn; daughter, s3t;
son, s3. These terms in tum were used for other family relationships. It is clear
these terms were ambiguous and this ambiguity has its background in the structure
of the family group. Troy (1986: 105) states further:

if one posits that the basic socio-economic unit was the extended
family , consisting of several generations , the use of the limited kinship
terminology makes some sense as the designation , not only of blood
relationships, but also of the relative ranking of the individuals within
the household unit.

It sounds strikingly like the seniority system of the Yoruba and lgbo.
It is safe to say that our view of ancient Egyptian society would change if we
could show that Egyptian was structured closer, in terms of gender, to Yoruba
than to Greek or Latin or Hebrew. Isis to Osiris would read: “I am your sibling.
I am your wife . I am the child of your mother who causes your beautiful face to
see.” At this point, I can only speculate, but it appears that this translation is in
keeping with the other African features of ancient Egyptian social structures.
These connections show that the “Mediterranean basin” really contained a multiplicity
of cultures and not just variations on the theme of Graeco-Roman patriarchy.
There obviously is still work to be done . A thorough study of ancient Egypt
through the lens of African feminism is a promising avenue for collaboration
between Black feminists and classicists . To quote Fannie Barrier Williams
(Loewenberg and Bogin 1976: 266), “As it is there is much to be unlearned as
well as to be learned.”

III. Re-empowering through Re-learning

How do we begin? First we classicists have to move away from the notion of
discipline. We speak of the discipline of classics; it evokes an image of narrow
boundaries and rigid inflexibility and exclusion. The discipline of classics purports
to study the ancient world, yet, in fact, only studies Greece and Rome . But
Greece and Rome were not the only cultures in the ancient world . We need to
think of classics in terms of ethnic studies and leave ourselves open to all
possibilities. Likewise, feminists, whether Black or White, need to rethink the
preference for theory over thought (Christian 1988; Lugones and Spelman 1983).
Central to this relearning and to my foregoing interpretation of ancient Egypt is
the acknowledgement of different standpoints. The standpoint of Black women
and its validity is in fact fundamental to Black feminist thought and forms; along
with reclaiming our foremothers, it is the core of this ideology (Collins 1990:

31

21-39). Patricia Hill Collins recently elaborated on the construct of standpoint
by retelling “The Emperor’s New Clothes. ” 16 The emperor had convinced all the
people that his new clothes were wonderful and that his were the only clothes
that were wonderful and that that was the only valid comment which could be
made about them. The adults were afraid to contradict the emperor because he
was the emperor and they never talked to one another. One day, during one of
the emperor’s parades, when everyone was praising the emperor’s new clothes ,
a little African-American girl said to the adult next to her, ” It seems to me that
the emperor is naked! Why do you all say the emperor’s clothes are wonderful,
when he isn ‘ t wearing any?” At first, the little girl was silenced by her fellow
bystanders, but she didn’t give up . She kept nudging and asking. Soon people
began to talk to one another and compare notes. Before this , the people never
talked to one another; they just accepted the emperor’s word . But once communication
began , the people began to support the African-American girl’s standpoint-
not as the sole one, or the “correct” one, but as a valid one . Obviously ,
Collins’s version of the story was ” read ” differently by different people in the
audience . For some, the emperor represented White male privilege, or knowledge, or voice. For me, he was the construct of the discipline of classics.

Only recently has the impact of the Anglo-Germanic construction of the discipline
of classics upon the evidence of the ancient world been fully investigated
(Bernal 1987). Martin Bernal shows the impact of Black slavery, racial science,
and Romanticism upon the reading of ancient evidence. Many of the assumptions
of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries about gender and race
are reflected in the discipline. They mean that any signs of culture or intellect
found on the continent of Africa must be devalued . Therefore, the Egyptians,
when acknowledged a s intellectual or civilized, become White . When they are
acknowledged to be of “mixed race” or African , then their “culture” is stagnant,
passive, or dead. 17 Furthermore, the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa are never
mentioned , and this omission implies the nonexistence of culture, or at least its
lack of relevance to Greece and Rome. Even the well-documented ethnic and
cultural diversity of Roman Africa is not considered an important issue. 18 This
kind of exclusion prevails in mainstream scholarship, and results in courses on
women in the ancient world that have no African or even Semitic women represented. The same problem has plagued White feminist theories in the past and was poignantly described by bell hooks ( 1981), Elizabeth Spelman ( 1982), Elizabeth
Hood (1978), and Phyllis Palmer(l983) for White women and Black women,
and by Paula Gunn Allen (1988) for White women and Native American women .
If the life and experience of Black women in America have been rendered so
invisible , it is not surprising to find a deeper invisibility for ancient African
women. We need to hear the tension between the ancient African cultures and
the culture of the Greek and Roman men who serve as the evidence of their
existence. We need to redefine our field so that it includes African languages,
African history, African archaeology. We need to hear and acknowledge the

38

silence of African women when we write books about ancient Africa from a
Eurocentric standpoint. We need to learn about African feminism so we can
restore their voice. We need to recognize that classics was the educational
foundation for our Black feminist foremothers . We need to analyze this as we
reclaim these feminists . We have already begun; a good example is Hazel Carby’s
(1985, 1987) analysis of Pauline Hopkins’s use of Sappho in her novel Contending
Forces.

Black feminist thought provides a standpoint from which to re-member, to reclaim,
to re-empower the ancient African woman. Through Black feminist
thought, classics can be radically transformed from a discipline into a multiracial,
multicultural, multivalent field which better reflects the ancient world it
studies. Black feminists, in tum, should view classics , not as the “enemy, ” but
as a source of symbolic value for so many of our foremothers as they struggled
against racism and sexism.

Notes

I would like to thank and acknowledge the following: Amy and Nancy, for asking me
to contribute to this volume, and for your suggestions and guidance which have been truly
helpful and insightful; Barbara Gold, Carl, and Judy, for your warm and empowering
friendship; Tina and Melanie, for Maine; Adrian, Iain, Caitlin, Jenny, Jake, and Elroy ,
for always reminding me of love and reality; June LeRay and Gerda Seligson, for loving
Latin and teaching me to do the same; Fanny Jackson Coppin, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary
Church Terrell, for doing it first; and to Mommy and Nama for telling me your dreams
and letting me fulfill them.

I. Londa Schiebinger (1990) analyzes how eighteenth-century science supported this
notion of Black intellectual inferiority. These assumptions of Black intellectual
inferiority are still around. In 1982, while I was attending the annual meeting of the
American Philological Association, I was chatting with a grants person (White male)
from NEH. When he learned that I taught classics at Howard, he said, “Gee, it must
be grim teaching classics to black people.”
2. Audre Lorde did not have the happy experience I did learning Latin. See Lorde
1982: 60.
3. Even the American Negro Academy, the foremost scholarly organization for AfricanAmericans
contemporary with Terrell and Cooper, did not admit women, despite
the recognition of some members that there had been “a higher attainment of
scholarship by our women than our men” (Moss 1981: 41). Faculty integration at
overwhelmingly White institutions of higher education began only in the 1940s when
the University of Chicago accepted a grant awarded by the Rosenwald Fund to pay
the salary of a Black faculty member.
4. Cleopatra’s Blackness is part of Black oral history. My grandmother may have
learned from that. She may well have been influenced by images of Josephine Baker.
Phyllis Rose (1990) titles her biography of Baker Jazz Cleopatra. Peiss (1990)
discusses the employment of Cleopatra in marketing cosmetics to Black women.
Black Feminist Thought and Classics I 39
Other Black women have heard similar stories from their relatives. Compare Golden
(1983: 4, her father is speaking): “I don’t care what they tell you in school, [Cleopatra]
was a black woman.”
5. Looking at a syllabus from that time I see listed Bullough (1978) , de Beauvoir
(1974), Putnam (1910), Rogers (1966) , and Slater (1968).
6. My ideas were formed by reading Cooper (1892), DuBois collected by Huggins
(1986) , King (1988), Collins (1990), Moses ( 1990), hooks (1981), Walker (1983) ,
Hull, Scott, and Smith (1982), and Terrell (1940).
7. The Cambridge Ancient History genealogy has “by a concubine” where Cleopatra’s
grandmother should be; the Greeks took Egyptian and Ethiopian women as mistresses.
See Pomeroy (1990: 55); cf. Cameron (1990). I think it is safe to say that
Cleopatra had Black ancestors.
8. The construction by scholars and filmmakers struck me as I viewed Pascal’s 1945
film version of G. B. Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, starring Vivien Leigh. The
dialogue intends for us to take Cleopatra as darker than the Roman Caesar , but the
visual presence of a very White and European Vivien Leigh contradicts the dialogue .
9. The theoretical standpoint I take here has been articulated by Bloom (1973) , Gilbert
and Gubar (1979), and Sadoff (1990). My use is unusual in that I am applying it to
history and historiography rather than literature.
10. This conclusion is one of the most important and overlooked of his work. The
American Philological Association Panel (1989) and the subsequent special issue
(1989) of Arethusa, “The Challenge of Black Athena,” concentrate on rather esoteric
points of research and interpretation. Lefkowitz ( 1992) trivializes the ramifications
of this conclusion.
11. See Haley (1989, 1990).
12. The Black feminist conception of inclusivity is not that of Kagan, where he states:
“We are all familiar with the demand for diversity of representation–one from each
color and continent, and so on” (Kagan 1990: 35).
13. The epithet “mysterious” is always applied to Africa, the “dark” continent. It extends
further to the people , especially women. Palmer (I 983: 158) analyzes it in this way:
“Black women, even more than other women forced to labor outside their homes,
come to symbolize sexuality , prowess , mysterious power (mysterious, certainly,
since it was so at odds with their actual economic, political and social deprivation);
they came to embody the ‘ myth of the superwoman. ‘ ”
14. For the African in Egyptian culture, see Trigger (1978), Trigger , Kemp, O’Connor
and Lloyd (1983) , Adams (1978), and Diop (1974, 1978).
15. I reread Omolade (1980), and consulted Terborg Penn, Harley, and Rushing (1987) ,
Amadiume (1987), and Steady (1981) .
16. Conference on “Integrating Class, Race and Gender into the Curriculum ,” sponsored
by Institute for Research on Women at SUNY, Albany at Albany, New York, June
7, 1991.
17. As near as I can tell, proponents of this theory posit an indigenous people of
“Caucasian stock” who were “diluted” by mixing with the “negroid” peoples of
Nubia and Kush. See Derry 1956.

40

18. The most recent study of Rome and its ethnic diversity is Thompson (1989). Camps
( 1960) deals with the ethnic and cultural diversity of Roman Africa ; Mokhtar ( 1990)
and Davidson (1959) are two of the few who deal with sub-Saharan Africa. Other
sources include Cracco Ruggini (1968 , 1974, 1979), Thompson and Ferguso n
(1969), and Bugner (1976) . Gender is only touched upon in these sources and usually
is ignored.

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Stemma Cleopatra.pdf

This Stemma comes from the Cambridge Ancient History, as referenced above in Shelley Haley (1993).  See especially the third slide.

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas112pomonavalentine/?p=544

28

End of the Republic :Chronological Table

Chronology of events, for your reference:

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas112pomonavalentine/?p=540

29

White at the Museum

Please watch this clip from Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, featuring Kenny and Keith Lucas, with guest star Sarah Bond:  “White at the Museum,” Post your responses, comments, and questions here using hypothes.is in the transcript.

30

'Race'-ing the Romans with Dr. Shelley Haley 10/19

Dr. Shelley Haley’s lecture, ‘Race’-ing the Romans, will be held on 10/19 @4:15 pm via Zoom: https://pomonacollege.zoom.us/j/88524039036

This page may be used for posting responses to Dr. Haley’s presentation via hypothes.is.

VII

Race, Gender, Ethnicity, & Cleopatra : Further Resources

The items in the Part of the Pressbook are not assigned preparation, but rather recommended resources for this module and Dr. Haley’s visit on 10/19.

31

Royster, Francesca T. 2003. Becoming Cleopatra : The Shifting Image of an Icon. New York : Palgrave Macmillan,.

Epilogue
Cleopatra in an Age of Racial Profiling
SINCE CLEOPATRA ALWAYS HAS APPEARED at the nexus of chang- ing identity, it was fitting that I went to see the Chicago Field Museum’s “Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth” exhibit in early October 2001. It was a few weeks after September 11, at a time when the “we” of the United States was under a heavy bur- den of self-fashioning. Ambiguous threats of violence still loomed on the horizon. I figured that, because of these fears of targeted public buildings and because it was also a Wednesday, the museum would be empty. But it was packed with nervous parents, children, couples and retirees. I had underestimated the fact that, in the same way that shopping became a Bush-sanctioned strategy for the everyday U.S. citizen to combat terrorism, visiting museums, national monuments and other public places under threatened at- tack gained a patriotic caché in those first weeks after the attacks. When I reached the entrance to the exhibit, I saw a snaking line that went out of the breezeway, past an exhibit of Julie Tamor’s costume designs and into the main hall. Beautiful tapestries of black and gold hung from the front, and several security guards

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wearing the kind of headphones that Madonna might use in con- cert were admitting small clusters of people into the packed ex- hibit hall.
Already weary of surveillance, having been “randomly” frisked and had our bags searched before entering the museum, my girl- friend and I decided to purchase a little privacy by renting the taped tour from a young white male guard. The audio tour fea- tured the voice of a female narrator, who described the back- ground history and some of the controversies of the exhibit in a calming, familiar, Middle American cadence. I was struck by the way that the audiotape finessed the rather sticky issues of Cleopa- tra’s race and brother-sister marriage by using the language of na- tional pride and family values: “Although the Ptolemies valued their Macedonian heritage, they won support in Egypt by adopt- ing Egyptian customs. They portrayed themselves as the Egypt- ian gods Osiris and Isis and practiced the royal habit of brother-sister marriages.” These observations were at times punc- tuated by a male British voice—and though we were not told his credentials, the tone of his commentary suggested a reassuring academic authority. The exhibit’s strategy to familiarize Cleopa- tra’s image by diffusing and deflecting racial and cultural differ- ence from an assumed white western norm had an (unintended) resonance in this particularly foreigner-phobic historical moment.
One key way that the exhibit deflected this complexity is in its handling of the question of Cleopatra’s race. Reflecting the white/black bias that is a part of much racial discourse in the United States, the only explicit address of race in the exhibit is the section entitled “Was Cleopatra Black?” Hidden in the darkest corner of the exhibit, a placard explains that by ancient Greek standards, “this would not have been much of an issue. . . . If someone from outside of Egypt became assimilated into Egyptian culture, his or her skin color probably mattered very little.” But if it did not matter in Egyptian culture, it certainly matters now. During my visit, a crowd of onlookers buzzed around this sec- tion—one of the few places in the exhibit where conversations be-

Epilogue 199
tween visitors seemed to be taking place. The exhibit as a whole erases the scholarly or popular engagement with these very issues that has taken place over the course of the twentieth century—and even earlier—in African American culture and elsewhere. Gone too are nuanced notions of nationalism, ethnicity and how we might historicize these terms. We are told, for example, that Alexandria was the “New York of its day,” but the language of col- onization, invasion or occupation is absent. Instead, the coexis- tence of Egyptian and Greek cultural signs is discussed in terms of style and in terms of the individualized political strategy and savvy of the Ptolemaic rulers. In contrast with the “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibit of the 1970s, which presented Egyptian art as universal and intrinsically fascinating, the Cleopatra exhibit represents Egypt and Egyptian style as significant only insofar as it is utilized by others.1 We are told that the geographer Strabo called Alexandria “the Greatest Emporium of the inhabited world” and that, because of its location, it could acquire luxury goods from Europe, Africa and Asia. Any further analysis of Egypt’s relations to these other areas is absent.
The inclusion of such a discussion, whether cast in popular or in academic terms, would have changed the face of this exhibit, which is primarily from the point of view of western classical history. The layout of the exhibit emphasizes the romanticization—and Ro- manization—of Cleopatra’s history, structuring the meeting be- tween Cleopatra and Julius Caesar as its true beginning and the death of Antony and Cleopatra as its climax. The parts of the ex- hibit that discuss Egyptian culture before Caesar and Cleopatra meet are cramped and spotty, only to open up into expansive dis- plays of artifacts dominated by images of Julius Caesar, Anthony and Octavius. In the sections that discuss Cleopatra’s relationships with the Roman leaders, complications like Cleopatra’s wedding to her brother and the amount of time (two years and two sons) that Antony spent with Octavia are ignored. The sections before, dur- ing and after Cleopatra’s life are shaped instead by the myth of the fallen woman—the woman who almost destroyed Rome.

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While the question of whether Cleopatra is black is asked and then dismissed by the exhibit, Cleopatra’s race—and specifically, the race of her face—is still the hidden center of the Field Mu- seum’s exhibit and its distinctions between history and myth. The contradictory message of the exhibit is that Cleopatra has multi- ple faces and yet that she really has only one face. This dichotomy surfaces in this review of the exhibit, which appeared in Museum Chicago:
[T]he great queen’s legend has grown to such a degree that it’s be- come all but impossible to separate fact from fiction. Cleopatra’s famous affairs, and her alleged power over Caesar and Antony, un- doubtedly bolstered her reputation as a woman of irresistible beauty and charm. But what she actually looked like may never be known. The exhibition’s set of bronze coins from Alexandria might be the most realistic portraits we have. A marble head on loan from the Vatican Museum may also bear a close resemblance, despite the absence of a nose. But regardless of Cleopatra’s appearance, the exhibition conjures up a ruler of keen intelligence and charisma, who spoke seven languages fluently. There’s even a sample of what’s believed to be her handwriting: the phrase “Make it so,” scrawled in Greek at the bottom of a tax document—an example of the mundane administrative tasks that most likely occupied much of the queen’s time.2
This refrain—“we don’t know what she looked like, but”—is re- peated throughout the exhibit’s placards, audio tour and much of the publicity surrounding it. But despite this warning, the white marble Roman bust of Cleopatra, “Head of a woman resembling Cleopatra VII, c. 50–40 B.C.” (from the British Museum’s collection), is what dominates the publicity, posters and banners (not the less glamorous images on the coins or the numerous Egyptian images).
As this book has shown, the ways that we represent, read and in- terpret the face have a powerful bearing on our public and private lives. The politics of portraiture is simultaneously about the politics of identity and the politics of interpretation. Current examples of the power of reading the face include the targeting of Arab and

Epilogue 201
Arab-looking people for hate crimes and violation of their civil rights after September 11 and the repeated history of racial profil- ing of African Americans, Latinos and other people of color by the police—illustrated poignantly by the cases of Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima and Rodney King. Racial profiling has had deadly consequences. Specific facial features—brown skin, beards, the shape of the nose, haircuts or accessories like turbans—are read as clues for one’s capacity for violence. As these cases illustrate, the reading of the face is central—and at times detrimental to our civil liberties, including our right to privacy, our rights to enter and leave national borders (or our own homes), our right to fair trial and sometimes our right to live. If we think specifically about cases of racial profiling of women—the forced strip-searches of African American women suspected of carrying drugs at airports, for ex- ample, or use of the image of the veiled Muslim woman to justify the current war on terrorism, we see how sexuality and cultural no- tions of beauty have bearing on civic freedoms and rights. These politics should be considered in our analysis of art. As art historian Richard Brilliant has written: “Portraits reflect social realities. Their imagery combines the conventions of behavior and appear- ance appropriate to the members of a society at a particular time, as defined by categories of age, gender, race, physical beauty, occu- pation, social and civic status, and class. The synthetic study of por- traiture requires some sensitivity to the social implications of its representative modes, to the documentary value of art works as as- pects of social history, and to the subtle interaction between social and artistic conventions.”3
The “right” face is context specific, perhaps, a performative, but it would be foolhardy to dismiss the reading of the face as merely aesthetic or merely theatrical. As philosopher Emmanuel Chuk- wudi Eze as recently shown, the very ordering of knowledge that we associate with the Enlightenment and humanism depends on the racial profiling of faces and bodies, from Carl Von Linne’s “System of Nature” to G. L. Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, David Hume and Immanuel Kant.4 Later eugenicists took up their

202 Becoming Cleopatra
works in more publicized racist campaigns. The history of the in- vention of race as a term depends heavily on the face and the read- ing of features to determine morality and citizenship. In western letters and art, the reading of the nonwhite face has been un- abashedly about reading one’s moral constitution. See, for exam- ple, Columbus’s reading of the faces of the San Salvador Indians’ “handsome faces” and open smiles in his search for the perfect Catholic converts,5 or seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn’s gushingly admiring description of Oroonoko and the exceptional handsomeness that marks him as a “royal slave”:
His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that na- tion are, but a perfect ebony, or polished jet. His eyes were the most awful that could be seen, and very piercing; the white of them being like snow, as were his teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen; far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble, and exactly formed, that bating his colour, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome.6
If, then, aesthetics and racial profiling are so closely united, it makes sense that the museum would be a particularly important social space as it shapes what it means to be an educated, well- informed citizen.
The Cleopatra exhibit maneuvers the question of Cleopatra’s multiple faces and races very carefully. It spends considerable time documenting Cleopatra’s use of Egyptian-style portraiture to create political and religious sympathy. We are told on a plac- ard that “During her reign, Cleopatra commissioned a number of self-portraits that served a variety of political purposes. Most sur- viving sculptures portray her as a powerful and divine Egyptian Queen. These are executed in the Egyptian styles and incorpo- rate symbols associated with earlier queens and the goddess Isis. Other portraits—such as the ones on her coinage—portray her as a strong Greek ruler. These are done in a naturalistic style and in-

Epilogue 203
clude the royal imagery of the Greek kingdom.” The distinctions between “Egyptian” as stylized and “Greek” and “Roman” as nat- ural, which follow conventions set in classical art history, presents Grecian artistic forms as inherently more transparent and, ulti- mately, encourages the impression that there is a singular face that we can ultimately find.
For example, a placard describing a frieze that combines Egyptian and Greek styles identifies the typically Greek aspects as including the use of Greek royal headbands, corkscrew braids and a single cornucopia—a symbol of Greek royalty in Egypt. These details are not described as “stylized.” The exhibit sets up a di- chotomy that makes all of its Egyptian examples “stylized” and the Greek and Roman examples either “naturalistic” or unmarked.
The exhibit even includes a chart, entitled “How can you tell it’s Cleopatra,” to help the viewer recognize Cleopatra’s face within the Egyptian portraits, which we are told are “highly styl- ized and don’t necessarily bear a likeness to their subjects. Instead they use symbols to communicate their status and identity.” Sig- nificantly, even though there are repeated warnings that we do not know what Cleopatra looked like, it is assumed that the Egyptian art is coded while the Greek portraiture somehow captures the “truth” of her visage.
The Caesar and Cleopatra section is the largest section and the one where the rhetoric of Cleopatra’s “true” images is the strongest, perhaps revealing the ways that the Roman perspective of history dominates the overall ethos of the exhibit. One bust, we are told, “strongly resembles Cleopatra, but it lacks the royal head- band. This confusing absence leads some to believe the subject is Cleopatra wishing to portray herself as a typical Roman woman. Others see it as a woman who closely modeled herself after the Egyptian Queen.” In the same display case is another “Marble Head of Woman Resembling Cleopatra” from first century B.C.E. We are told that “Although the subject’s eyes and nose resemble that of Cleopatra, she is probably a woman who imitated the queen’s style.” Apparently, we now know what Cleopatra’s eyes

204 Becoming Cleopatra
and nose look like, as well as her style. Although these portraits are no more stable than the Egyptian ones, the language of re- semblance is used confidently. Moreover, the rationale behind this confidence is never explained but remains mystified.
By the time we get to the marble portrait of Cleopatra VII from Berlin’s Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, which is placed at the door leading to the Antony and Cleopatra section, the rhetoric of re- semblance is more confident than ever. The placard proclaims: “This remarkably complete portrait embodies all of the features that scholars associate with Classical images of Cleopatra VII: the ‘melon hairstyle’: broad royal headband; small coiled curls around the face”—all stylized aspects, I might add—as well as “large downturned eyes; prominent nose with curving nostrils; and full lower lip.”
The tension between the Greek versions of Cleopatra’s portrait and the Egyptian versions and the exhibit’s inherent bias toward the former has a history that is reflected in culture and politics of museums, including the British Museum, the source of several of the artifacts included in the exhibit. According to art historian Inderpal Grewal, in the nineteenth century, when the British Mu- seum was actively acquiring and building its collection of antiqui- ties, Greek art functioned as a signifier of purity and transcendent value, while Egyptian art signified materiality. The 1926 museum guide confirms this distinction, suggesting that Greek art has an “intrinsic merit” that “speak[s] for itself.”7 The same guidebook suggests that figures of Egyptian sculpture represents “a phantasm and a dream,” not a reality, and were similar to those “which haunt us in that nervous affection called the nightmare.”8 According to the 1826 guidebook, “We do not feel the least degree of human sympathy with the face [of an Egyptian statue]. Because there is nothing individualized about it”; instead of uplifting the viewer toward the sublime, such art supposedly “exercises an almost painful and oppressive effect on the imagination.”9 The guidebook suggests that Egyptian art’s value is determined by the collector, and the decision whether to display it.

Epilogue 205
These nineteenth century patrons of the British Museum, some newly initiated into the culture of museum-going, should find a special appeal in Greek art because of its supposed resem- blance and therefore accessibility to the people of England:
While Egyptian culture was believed to have nothing that could be called “natural,” statues of Jupiter and Apollo supposedly were “ac- tual likenesses of men and women that most of us have seen in the course of our own lives” (1826, 13). For the growing popular audi- ence of the British Museum in the 19th Century, exhibits of Gre- cian and Egyptian art, aided by accessible resources like easy to read guidebooks, were important tools for the formation of the proper national subject—a way to “absorb alien histories and cul- tures within the historical context of his own history.”10
The Field Museum Store, located at the end of the Cleopatra exhibit, becomes the perfect place for twenty-first-century Chicago museum patrons to “absorb” the alien history of Cleopatra’s life into their own, by owning a piece of her. Images from either white Hol- lywood and Roman and Greek statues dominate the products. One can consume the catalog from the exhibit or exhibit posters, which both feature the “Marble Head of a Woman Resembling Cleopatra VII.” Other products include a Vivien Leigh–as–Cleopatra mug and a video on Cleopatra starring Angelica Houston. Michelle Lovric’s book, Cleopatra’s Face: Fatal Beauty, is perhaps the only ex- tended treatment of the issue of Cleopatra’s multiple identities (al- though it does not include her African American identities). This book nonetheless features the single face of Vivien Leigh on the cover—the same shot as the mug. The Museum store even offers an inexpensive white Cleopatra mask that invites us to perpetuate and become this image of her. While some busts of Egyptian mummies, replicas of sarcophagi and Egyptian jewelry are for sale, the prod- ucts associated with Cleopatra herself predominantly feature white western images.
How might the United States figure itself in relation to this older British model of Greek classical “purity” and Egyptian “difference”?

206 Becoming Cleopatra
Does it reach beyond the desire to buy and own beautiful things, capitalized on by the museum’s store? Within the exhibit, Egypt is distanced from the onlooker, figured in the charts and placards as an “aesthetic” or style rather than as a culture or people. Egypt as a na- tion is visible only as it is filtered through Cleopatra’s face. In turn, Cleopatra’s face depends on what is happening on the Roman front. As I have suggested, the museum space is not isolated from national tensions and crises. We might consider the power of the Cleopatra exhibit’s distancing itself from all things Egyptian in light of the atmosphere of suspicion brewing against Arabs and Arab-looking people outside of the museum’s doors.
These suspicions have bearing on the controversies surround- ing African American claims to the Cleopatra icon—controver- sies that this exhibit virtually ignores. The exclusion of African American voices in this exhibit reflects U.S. domestic tensions around the question of racial difference and is a symptom of a larger lack that may be traced to older distinctions between civi- lization and barbarity, style and substance and the supremacy of whiteness typified by the treatment of Egyptian and Greek art in the British Museum. While I do not want to collapse the distinc- tions between Egyptian and African American culture, I would like to note the ways that, especially in the current political envi- ronment, we have shared stakes in terms of the demonization of our faces, culture and images.11 This affinity has its own history, that is reflected in the interest in political, cultural and religious life of Egypt and the Middle East of African American activists and intellectuals like Muhammad Ali and James Baldwin and, in turn, in the interest in the state of blacks in America reflected in the anticolonialist discourse of Egyptian leaders and thinkers.12 Perhaps this affinity is one reason why both Cleopatra (an Egypt- ian) and Othello (a “Moor”) have been so enthusiastically appro- priated in African American arts as symbols of the pressures of objectification and assimilation in the United States.
What has been touted in the press as particularly American about the Chicago version of the “Cleopatra of Egypt: From His-

Epilogue 207
tory to Myth” was its engagement with popular images of Cleopa- tra. The exhibit, curated by Susan Walker and Peter Higgs, was launched at the Palazzo Ruspoli museum in Rome in spring 2001. It traveled to the British Museum and on to the United States, to the Field Museum in Chicago. Mimicking the multiplicity of the Cleopatra icon discussed in this book, at each stop the exhibit shifted to suit different—and sometimes clashing—national takes on the Cleopatra legend. The version presented at the Palazzo Ruspoli featured a final room dedicated to Cleopatra’s time as Caesar’s lover and consort and emphasized the influence of Egyptian divinities on Roman culture. The London exhibit em- phasized Cleopatra’s place in Victorian arts and letters. The final stop in Chicago added a segment on Cleopatra’s afterlife in Hol- lywood films and other forms of popular culture.13 Even though the Field Museum’s version distinguished itself from others by in- cluding images of Cleopatra from American popular culture, it did not include any of the discussions of Cleopatra in African American popular culture mentioned in this book—this is despite the fact that the museum is located on the cusp of a historically black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.14
What the museum interprets as the American “popular” re- sponse to Cleopatra is a very limited one, distinguished by classi- cism as well as racism. In the popular Cleopatra section, we see photos of Victorian ladies dressed as Cleopatra in leopard skins and jewels, accompanied by black servants, also dressed in “orien- talist” wear, like the 1897 photo of Lady de Grey with an un- named black attendant. There are also a few photographs of productions featuring African American opera divas (Leontyne Price in a 1996 Met Opera production of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra and Kathleen Battle in a 1988 production of Guilio Caesar). A nod to the middlebrow, the original gowns worn by Elizabeth Taylor and Vivien Leigh in the Hollywood film Cleopatras are displayed prominently in elevated glass cases, worn by clear Lucite mannequins. Each of these representations has its own politics of race that stands without comment in the exhibit.

208 Becoming Cleopatra
Cleopatra has been an important way within black culture to discuss a range of political issues regarding identity, including racial and sexual politics, crime and especially, the pressures of as- similation. The embrace and performance of Cleopatra in popular African American culture has had a profound effect on American popular cultural images of her at large. For example, in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine, film director Barry Sonnenfeld was asked to recast (in his head) a classic Hollywood film with his favorite star. Sonnenfeld, who directed rapper Will Smith in Men in Black I and II, chose Queen Latifah to replace Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Justifying his choice, he writes: “I don’t think there was ever a queen with more style than Cleopatra—and, of course, substance. Queen Latifah has both. I’m a big fan and I want to suck up to her so she’ll be in one of my movies.”15 We see in this example both how hip-hop has become central in popular culture and how African American Cleopatras have shaped her popular American vision. As many culture analysts have now observed, hip-hop is a form of mainstream culture—it is impossible for major corporate players to ignore its influence on youth markets.16 This influence goes both ways. Within hip-hop culture, Cleopa- tra has become a sign of a celebrity’s crossover power as well as her Afrocentric sensibility. Not for nothing have Janet Jackson, Missy Eliot and Lil’ Kim all chosen Cleopatra-inspired outfits for major televised music awards like the Grammies and the MTV Awards, a form of publicity that connects hip-hop performers to even wider audiences.
To me the most intriguing recent manifestation of the Cleopa- tra icon has been in the form of Miss Cleo, the psychic and star of numerous late-night infomercials, Internet sites and phone-in psychic services. Miss Cleo’s past success reflects the economic vi- ability of her own combination of Cleopatra’s reinvention, Afro- centric spirituality and Oprah-style self-help, flavored with her biting “Jamaican” humor. It has been revealed, however, that Miss Cleo may not be Jamaican after all and, perhaps less difficult to prove, may not be psychic. She is, in fact, the face behind the Psy-

Epilogue 209
chic Readers Network, a system of psychic hotlines that pulled in more than $400 million in 2001 for Access Resource Services, a corporation run by Florida businessman Steven Feder. Both Miss Cleo and Access Resources Services have been named in a series of lawsuits in Florida for alleged overly aggressive billing practices and deceptive advertising and the ads and shows have been re- moved from the air.17 In Florida, these charges have since been dropped in a $44 million settlement.18 The cases that targeted Miss Cleo specifically argued that she has made false claims to her reputation as a psychic—that her claim to being “nationally renowned” in her ads mislead her viewers, forming a false rela- tionship of trust. Yet in an interview with Matthew Bean in Savoy Magazine, Miss Cleo contends that, while the name “Miss Cleo” and the image are owned by the Access Resource Services corpo- ration, she is the “real thing.” According to Miss Cleo, whose real name is Youree D. Harris, her gift is much bigger than the Psy- chic Readers Network, and cannot be owned by a corporation. She tells Bean: “Just call me Cleo, not ‘Miss Cleo.’ . . . That’s who I was, that’s who I came to them with. And I’m gonna keep on going.”19 Is Miss Cleo the real thing? What does her case reveal about the continued relationship between Afrocentricity and the ways that the Cleopatra icon moves in popular culture at large? Do Miss Cleo’s viewers use the network to seek the “real thing” or a performance? How do we distinguish between the two? Jokes and imitations about Miss Cleo have popped up on Saturday Night Live and Boondocks,20 and in my own classroom, where stu- dents put on a production of Othello that featured Miss Cleo giv- ing Othello (bad) romantic advice. Clearly, like the other Cleos before her, Miss Cleo’s contested authenticity has not stopped her from leaving her mark on U.S. popular culture at large.
While dismissed by many as the stuff of jokes, Miss Cleo and her claims to psychic authority have some relevance to the larger issues of authenticity that haunt the Field Museum’s Cleopatra exhibit (and the Cleopatra icon as a whole). Both betray an anxi- ety around what constitutes “culture” and whose face is reflected

210 Becoming Cleopatra
in that culture. Both also reveal uneasiness with the theatrical as- pects of identity. If, as the exhibit points out, the historical Cleopatra spoke like an Egyptian and practiced religion like an Egyptian, what makes her Greek, after all? How might the boundaries between insider and outsider be protected? Does Miss Cleo’s Los Angeles birth certificate make her any less psychic than if she were born in Jamaica? Is it really true that she was an extra on Miami Vice? Finally, Miss Cleo, as both psychic and corporate entity, has the capacity to infiltrate and perhaps also expose the in- nermost fears and anxieties of the nation. Might Miss Cleo’s Psy- chic Readers Network be storing vital consumer information gleaned from our romantic woes for future marketing schemes? Likewise, as we track the Cleopatra icon, we see that she resur- faces in moments of change and therefore great cultural vulnera- bility. I for one will keep on watching.

32

Biddick, Kathleen, John R. Clarke, Stephen F. Eisenman, Ikem Stanley Okoye, and Frances K. Pohl. 1996. “Aesthetics, Ethnicity, and the History of Art.” The Art Bulletin 78 (4): 594–621

A RANGE OF CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES: Aesthetics, Ethnicity, and the History of Art

Last summer I encountered two etchings done by Albrecht Altdorfer immediately prior to the destruction of the Regensburg synagogue and the expulsion of its resident Jews by civic order in February 1519 (Figs. 1, 2). His etchings chilled me.[1] I was intrigued by the fact that they were reproduced in a compelling study of his landscapes by Christopher Wood. They can also be found in compendia of Early Renaissance etchings and engravings and in catalogues of Altdorfer’s work. Genre, medium, oeuvre–none of these categories suffices to provide a reading practice capable of addressing the gap between these two images. It is between the one study of two Jews standing on the threshold of the Regensburg synagogue and the second of the stripped architectural interior of the synagogue that an aesthetics of disappearance does its work. How can the viewer read such an aesthetics historically and politically?

What I want to do in this essay is to wrench these etchings out of the familiar categories of genre, medium, and oeuvre and relocate them in a history of scientific representation. Thereby it becomes possible to see how the etchings both encode a history of Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict and foreclose on it through “disappearing” Jews. This aesthetics of disappearance deserves attention in the history of scientific representation as a sign of early modern European ethnography, a “science” which grounded itself on the ontological absence of Jews. The Altdorfer etchings can be read as formative and constitutive of this new science. Critique of their ethnography makes it possible to rethink Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict not as something incomprehensible, instinctive, a historical, but rather as a genealogy of the power of the “rational” and the “technical.”

Clues to a history of Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict abound in the etchings, in each of which Altdorfer incorporated an epigraphic plaque. The first inscription reads: PORTICUS SINAGOGAE / IUDAICAE RATISPONEN[SIS] / FRACTA 21 DIE FEB. / ANN. 1519 (The porch of the Jewish synagogue at Regensburg destroyed February 21, 1519). The second reads: ANNO D[OMI]NI D XIX / IUDAICA RATISPONA / SYNAGOGA IUSTO / DEI IUDICIO FUNDIT[U]S EST EVERSA (In the year of the Lord 1519 the Jewish Regensburg synagogue was utterly destroyed by the just judgment of God). The language of the second epigraph in particular struck me. I knew that the formula “iusto dei iudicio” (by the just judgment of God) came from the juridical world of the medieval ordeal, a method of trial in which the accused was exposed to a physical test, such as hot iron or boiling water applied to the flesh, from which he or she, if innocent, would be protected by God. The rendering of the interior of the synagogue also drew on the rich architectural metaphors developed by Christians for discussing circumcision. I knew from my readings of medieval anti-Jewish polemic that the repudiation of circumcision under the New Law, its effacement as an inscription, was imagined in architectural terms. The epigraph’s claim “funditus est eversa” (was utterly destroyed) hauntingly echoes traditional commentary on Isaiah 28:16 to be found in anti-Jewish polemic, such as the Disputatio by Gilbert Crispin, who compares Christ to the cornerstone of the temple of Sion. As a carefully hewn cornerstone Christ ‘”justifies circumcision from the faith and the foreskin through the faith” (“circumcisionem iustificat ex fide et preputium per fidere”).[2] Altdorfer’s epigraphic gesture, the public lettering of the plaques in each print, also pointed to the importance of transmitting a message of civic and monumental knowledge. Together, these clues suggested to me that the prints worked as a montage condensing the juridical world of the ordeal, the ritual of circumcision, and the work of public writing. To read against an aesthetics of disappearance would thus entail opening gaps in between these various superimpositions, showing their sutures.

What follows is an ethnic genealogy that materializes the space of disappearance in between the two Altdorfer etchings. By the end of the essay this space of disappearance will fold into origami. To assemble this paper sculpture, fold the porch of the synagogue (Fig. 1) to become the inside of a crypt and then roll out the second etching (Fig. 2) to become the slab to be placed over that crypt. As the origami is finished, the slab becomes the surface of inscription upon which ethnographers have written disappearance for half a millennium.[3] Write graffiti there, read a “history that will be.”

The foreskin is the first clue. Beginning in Late Antiquity, who was circumcised and who was not came to play a crucial role in differentiating Christians and Jews not only theologically, but also ethnically. My story about Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict begins, then, with the rites of Baptism and circumcision and how these rites came to confer ethnic status by virtue of their differentiating inscriptions. Richly discursive and passionately held differences over pleasure, sexual renunciation, and the hierarchy of body and soul came to be polarized around the heart in Baptism and the foreskin in circumcision. Since a graphic struggle over the legibility of these ritual inscriptions of Baptism and circumcision marked a divide from Late Antiquity, and since the architectural content of the etchings proposes the persistence of this struggle, I am approaching the cultural politics of Christian and Jewish ethnicities as a contest over inscription.

Rites of Baptism and circumcision do not occur in isolation. They are ritual performances of embodiment that take place within wider institutional settings in which questions of what counts as visible and legible are negotiated. Institutions also have their own graphic processes, their own writing machines. A study of ethnic conflict over these inscriptions, therefore, requires a notion of inscription that can account for how a graphic inscripted on the body or soul can travel from that body or soul into institutional networks. Cultural studies of scientific representation, in particular of inscription, offer a way of thinking about such leaps.

Bruno Latour, a sociologist of science, thinks of inscription as graphic transformations of things in the world, visible and invisible, such as stars, viruses, genes, bodies, and so on, onto paper (and now onto disk) for the purposes of dissemination. Thus, for example, some aspect of dinosaur locomotion can be graphically rendered and that rendering can be photographed or digitally scanned. The image can then be reproduced in a variety of formats, such as museum exhibits, books, slides, films, videos, T-shirts, which can in turn be disseminated and travel. These traveling inscriptions can be seen and recognized by thousands of viewers and can conscript them into believing in the validity of a particular representation of dinosaurs (say, the kinder, gentler, smarter mammalian dinosaur), a beast, which, after all, no one has actually seen alive. Inscriptions, according to Latour, thus “allow conscriptions” of viewers around representation and are therefore powerful mobilizing tools.[4]

Like the initial artistic rendering of the dinosaur, medieval anti-Jewish polemic, mostly fictionalized accounts of disputes between Christian and Jewish intellectuals, can be regarded as a graphic transformation of the invisible inscription of Baptism on the heart and the visible inscription of circumcision on the foreskin into monastic and university networks where disputes over ethnic legibility were further engaged. A brief comparison of two of the most popular medieval Christian-Jewish disputations, namely Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogi contra Iudaeos (1108-10) and Gilbert Crispin’s Disputatio Iudaei et Christiani (ca. 1096), shows how such translations operate to construct networks of inscriptions organized around ethnic conflicts over the legibility of Baptism and circumcision.

In the prologue to Crispin’s Disputatio, the reader learns the outcome of the debate between the Christian and the Jew, its “happy ending”–the Jewish interlocutor is baptized in a public ceremony in London and becomes a monk. The very writing of this Disputatio, then, constitutes a graphic inscription of Baptism onto the textual body of the Jewish interlocutor. Imagine that Crispin writes his text on the heart of his Jewish interlocutor as a way of making the inscription of Baptism visible. Whereas Crispin, as a Christian, works out the problem of Baptism for Jews, Petrus Alfonsi, as a baptized Jew, works out the problem of both Baptism and circumcision in his Dialogi, disputing with his former Jewish self, which he enfolds in the persona of Moses. He uses scientific arguments and, what is important, for the first time in this polemical genre, scientific diagrams, in order to discredit Moses and his talmudic knowledge for its irrationality.[5] These diagrams are not only scientific inscriptions; they also work to cover over Alfonsi’s circumcision. Alfonsi inscribes these scientific diagrams like tattoos over the visible “writing” of his circumcision, thereby rendering circumcision an illegible inscription that cannot be linked to “science.” Scientific diagrams render visible the invisible graphic of his Baptism.

Alfonsi’s strategy of using diagram and text linked his polemic not only into theological networks but into scientific ones as well. Ethnic conflict thus traveled to new audiences. Not surprisingly, it was the most widely disseminated text among medieval Christian-Jewish polemics precisely because it combined sought-after scientific diagrams with polemic over ethnic inscription.[6] In contrast, the Crispin Disputatio contains no diagrams. It matched the popularity of the Alfonsi text in the twelfth century (with twenty-two manuscripts), but then interest tailed off quickly with only seven copies produced in the thirteenth century and only two copies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It would seem that the lack of diagrams in Crispin’s Disputatio constrained its circulation to a narrower temporal and pietistic network and thereby dampened its effect on ethnic conflict.

So far I have tried to show how the genre of anti-Jewish polemic came to translate a Christian-Jewish conflict over corporeal inscription into graphic forms that, as a mobilizing tool, could circulate widely beyond the body, thus significantly expanding the discursive field. There were, however, important inscriptional limits to how long the chain of translation could become in twelfth-century Christendom. The dead end lay with the all-important link to the juridical writing machine of the day, the ordeal, a form of proof which relied on hot water, hot irons, or immersion to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused in cases where normal juridical procedures, most notably compurgation, the sworn endorsement of friends and neighbors of the accused, were not deemed applicable.

The second plaque of the Altdorfer etching superimposes the language of the ordeal on the empty, stripped space of the interior of the Regensburg synagogue. The epigraphy, its chiseled quality, insistently reminds that inscription played a crucial role in the ordeal. Hot water or the hot iron “inscribed” the hand of the accused with signs to be read and interpreted for guilt or innocence. The chief ritual parallel for the ordeal was Baptism; indeed, in Old Norse the word for ordeal and Baptism are the same. The limitation of the ordeal, however, lay in its inability to translate the wound or scar of the hot water or iron into a graphic that could be disseminated more widely in inscriptional networks. The ordeal could only inscribe around ritual and could not be produced as disseminating inscription. Just as Crispin’s Disputatio was limited to the ritual performance of Baptism of the Jewish interlocutor in London, so ordeal was confined by its corporeal writing pad. These limitations traced a perimeter to the discursive field of ethnic conflict.

The inquest, which came to replace ordeal by fiat of the prelates gathered at the Fourth Lateran Council convened in 1215, breached the perimeter.[7] Whereas in the ordeal hot iron or hot water “wrote” the corporeal inscription, in the inquest the main gesture was notarial writing: a notary was always present to commit the oral proceedings to parchment or later to paper, thus producing an official record written most often in Latin before 1450. Put another way, inquisitorial process translated the corporeal writing pad of the ordeal into the trial record, which was a portable graphic that could be extracted, stored, copied, and circulated.

The practice of the inquest became incorporated into the inquisitorial procedures of the Church not long after the Fourth Lateran Council. The graphic practices of the inquisition transformed and intensified the conflict over inscription between Christians and Jews by multiplying the possibilities of translation and thus extending the chain of the inscriptional network.[8] Also key to understanding this reframing of inscriptional conflict is medieval torture, the threat of which was necessary to inquisition, and the practice of which predictably accompanied its spread. Torture raises the important question of the relation of the textual bodies produced by the notary’s writing hand and the sentient bodies enduring pain in the torture chamber. Is the tortured body to be thought of as the body of the ordeal displaced by the notarial writing hand? This question, I think, is also relevant to reading the etchings. Are the Jews in the porch of the synagogue in the first etching to be thought of as the body of the ordeal (to which the plaque of the second etching refers) displaced by the etching hand of Altdorfer?

The answer to this question is no, since the question misunderstands notarial writing in the inquisition, and, as I shall further show, misrepresents the Altdorfer etching. Inquisitorial writing produced textual bodies in a writing space that works like a montage, in which different and discontinuous spaces exist simultaneously and collide. If we think of the O. J. Simpson trial, we know that the trial witnessed by the jury was very different from the trial witnessed by television viewers. We might say that the jury occupied a different, noncontinuous space literally and conceptually. Similarly, the space in which inquisitorial writing took place, conceptually speaking, was also different and noncontinuous from the space of both the accused and the tortured. There is no unity of gesture and situation in the inquisitorial writing space. These disjunctures, this issue of montage, sharply question the traditional ways in which medieval historians have read and interpreted inquisitorial trial transcripts and should enhance our understanding of how inquisitions inscribed and disseminated the inscription of Baptism in the Christian-Jewish competition over ethnicity.

Two inquisition cases will show how the inquisitorial writing space worked and also how the gesture of inquisitorial writing actually produced the graphic of ritual during the course of these trials. First, take the famous trial in 1320 of Baruch, a noted rabbi, in the court of Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers, the future Pope Benedict XII.[9] This inquisition revolved around the question of whether or not Baruch’s Baptism under the threat of death at the hands of marauding Pastorelli was authentic or forced. Without the trial the status of Baruch’s Baptism would remain in question, illegible. The question then is one of inscription. How can an inquisition decide legibility?

The bishop draws up the sides in this inquisition. He insists, in outright contradiction of Baruch’s confession, that there was no absolute force (“coactione absoluta”) involved in his Baptism; therefore, Baruch is obliged by law and reason (“secundem iura et racionem”) to concur in his Baptism; otherwise the bishop will proceed against him as an obstinate heretic. An uncanny, elliptical disjuncture then ensues in the trial record. At this point the different and noncontinuous spaces of the inquest collide as the bishop engages Baruch in a lengthy disputation, similar in genre to that of Alfonsi and Crispin. The collision, however, transforms the disputation from a polemic to a trial by battle. Here we have a montage that produces the bishop and Baruch as armed contestants. In the gap between the writing space and the accused, the ritual of the duel over inscription takes place.

To make a long disputation short, Baruch “loses” the judicial combat. He then swears that the persecution which resulted in his Baptism was for the good of his soul; he now believes from the heart. The bishop “wins” the efficacy of the trial record to render legible the inscription of Baptism on the heart of Baruch. If one wanted to find graphic evidence of Baruch’s Baptism, one would revert not to his body but to the trial record. The inquisition produced illegible or invisible inscriptions as visible and legible graphics that then reside in archived inquisitorial registers, which could and did travel.

Trial records were not only handwritten; extracts and versions of trial records were also printed after the 1450s. Remember, too, that Altdorfer, who worked in a variety of print and nonprint media, chose etching, a print medium, for his renderings of the Regensburg synagogue. Did print technology refigure yet again the inscriptional conflict between Christians and Jews? The Trent ritual-murder trial of 1475 offers an important example of the imbrication of inquisition with print culture. The trial record, constructed from the torture and interrogation of eighteen Trent Jews, narrates the details of an alleged ritual murder, including bleeding, mutilation, and circumcision, of a Christian child named Simon. Figure 3 is just one example of the printed images that circulated along with printed as well as handwritten versions of the Trent trial record. It depicts, in the crowded and seemingly medicalized space of the medieval barber, the body of a little male Christian patient/victim spread out on a table. Jewish barbers/torturers pinch his flesh, draw his blood, and circumcise him. This engraving offers important evidence of yet another layer of translation of inscriptional conflict, a translation from the torture chamber to the world of the reader of printed books and collector of “holy images.”

The relays of this translation from torture chamber to printed image are worth pausing over. In the torture chamber at Trent, Christians tortured Jews. In the engraving, Jews become torturers; one brandishes the knife of circumcision. Their victim is a Christian. The tortured bodies of the Jews of Trent are translated by the illustrator into the graphic body of Simon Martyr; the graph of their circumcision inscribes itself onto the little boy’s body, just as the hot water and hot iron of the ordeal inscribed itself on the accused. The engraving turns both the sacrament of Baptism and the torture room inside out. The proliferation of woodcuts and engravings depicting the Trent trial and the boy martyr Simon extended the writing space of the inquisition into the reading space of the viewer; montage is becoming more encompassing.

The violence of the Simon images, their double graphic of a baptized boy being circumcised, tells us about the terror of Christians at their own violence/pleasure. Such inquisitions are not really about “knowledge” but about pleasure, a pleasure that denies its violence and claims it as knowledge. Pleasure and knowledge of inquisition collapse into each other in the Trent engraving and make it impossible to acknowledge “the other’s defiance, which is what encounter consists of.”[10] The Trent engraving teeters on the edge of ethnography, where the ontological absence of Jews becomes a new writing surface.

We have seen that the inquisition, as a writing machine, multiplied the graphic sites of contest over Christian-Jewish inscription, since the inscribed bodies produced by inquisition could be reproduced in other media and disseminated even more widely. The inquisition thus extended the possibilities for chains of inscriptions, ever broadening the discursive field of ethnic conflict. The inquisitorial writing machine worked as a graphic apparatus for performing ritual at a distance, something we have seen that the ordeal could not do.

I would now like to return to the Altdorfer etchings in order to ask whether printing itself had become constitutive of ethnic conflict by the end of the fifteenth century. The answer to this question is crucial to the transformation of ethnic conflict into ethnography.[11] The Altdorfer etchings teach us the strength to be found in conscription through inscription. Altdorfer translates graphic Jews into architectural space. Their absence becomes the formal presence of “perspectival” architecture. This translation marks an important shift in register from ethnicity to ethnography. Ethnography is that writing space where others are reduced to ontological absence.[12] Altdorfer’s very act of etching architectural space, rendering the synagogue as an architectural study, becomes constitutive of a new discourse, ethnography. The architectural space etched by Altdorfer forecloses further ethnic conflict over circumcision between Christians and Jews. In so doing, the etching effaces the inscription of circumcision–violent pleasure has become the “knowledge” of space itself. Architectural rendering as a new category of representation covers over the cut foreskin.

The etchings produce something new, a crypt. It is on that stone surface that the ethnographer Altdorfer inscribes his new ethnography, which he signs with his monogram. His ethnography is not about contested ethnic co-presence of Christians and Jews, but the narcissism of the Same; the conflict is resolved.

I have argued that bodily inscriptions of Baptism and circumcision and the cascades of graphic translations which passed through such diverse media as polemic, torture chambers, and engravings and etchings came to constitute Christian-Jewish ethnic relations at the level of the printed graphic itself. By implication I am saying that printing not only represented this contest but actually came to constitute it. As such, graphic inscriptions signifying ethnic conflict between Christians and Jews linked together cascades of discursive networks. Altdorfer’s architectural translation might then be read not only as the new writing surface of ethnography but also as the crypt in which Christians finally buried the foreskin, thus foreclosing the possibility of mourning the loss of corporeal inscription which Paul had disavowed so many centuries earlier. This crypt, its graphic materiality, has served as a site of European ethnographic authority for half a millennium. Its staunch resistance to brilliant postcolonial critiques should give us pause and urge us to think more attentively about the aesthetics of disappearance and the work of mourning.

1. My thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation and to Jim Clifford and colleagues at the Center for Cultural Studies (University of California at Santa Cruz) for the sabbatical opportunity to think about ethnography (1994). I am grateful to my colleague Graham Hammill for his suggestions about gesture, to Kerry Walk, as ever, for her rigor and enthusiasm, and to Andrea Roth for her work obtaining the reproductions for this essay. The students in my spring seminar, 1996, “Becoming Inquisitorial: Discipline/ Technology,” provided inspiration for this paper to which I am indebted: Gabriel Ash, Scott Baier, Christine Caldwell, Justin Cole, Dan Hobbins, David Mengel, Kevin Russeau, and Sarah Soja. I can only briefly acknowledge here the discursive literature which deeply engages this essay. On Christian-Jewish polemic, see B. Blumenkranz, Disputatio Iudei et Christiani Gilberti Crispini, Antwerp, 1956; Petrus Alfonsi in Pat. Lat., CLVII, cols. 527-672; and John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers, Gainesville, Fla., 1993. See also Anna Sapir Abulafia, “Bodies in the Jewish-Christian Debates,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, Manchester, 1994, 124-37; Miri Rubin, “The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily Order,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, 100-122; and Gilbert Dahan, La Polemique chretienne contre le Judaisme au Moyen Age, Paris, 1991. On ordeal and inquest, and here only a starting point, see Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law, Berkeley, 1977; Talal Asad, “Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, 1993, 83-124; and Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal, Oxford, 1986. Suggestive, too, for problems of inquisitorial writing space and montage are Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, 1979; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis, 1989; Monique David-Menard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca, N.Y., 1989; Jonathan Goldberg, “The History That Will Be,” GLQ, 1, 1995, 385-404; and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, 1996.

2. Blumenkrantz (as in n. 1), 42.
3. To consider this question, how ethnicity becomes ethnography, through a study of Christian-Jewish inscriptions is to begin rethinking the colonialdiscipline of European ethnography as emerging not in an imagined encounter of the Old and New Worlds, but within graphic conflicts between Christians and Jews. For the need to do so, see Daniel Boyarin, “‘Epater l’embourgeoisement’: Freud, Gender and the (De)Colonized Psyche,” Diacritics, XXIV, 1994, 17-41; Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, Princeton, NJ., 1993; John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, New Haven, 1994; Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: The “Jewish Question” and English National Identity, Durham, N.C., 1995; Eric L. Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, Princeton, N.J., 1996; and James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, New York, 1996.
4. Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Stephen Woolgar, Cambridge, 1990, 50.
5. For bibliography and more detailed explication of the Alfonsi Dialogi and subsequent layering of inscriptions in medieval mappaemundi, travel literature, and Ptolemaic maps, see Kathleen Biddick, “ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet,” in Text and Territory, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, Philadelphia, 1997, forthcoming.
6. Alfonsi’s Dialogi continued to be copied through the 15th century (21 copies in the 12th century; 24 copies in the 13th; 14 copies in the 14th; 18 copies in the 15th). In only two instances were the Alfonsi and Crispin polemics bound together.
7. For the Latin text and translation, see canons 8 (“De inquisitionibus”/ “On inquests”) and 18 (“De iudicio sanguinis et duelli clericis interdicto”/ “On sentences involving either the shedding of blood or a duel being forbidden to clerics”), in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Washington, D.C., 1990, 236-39, 244.
8. For the importance of the gender and sexuality of inquisitorial inscription, see Kathleen Biddick, “The Devil’s Anal Eye: Inquisitorial Optics and Ethnographic Authority,” in Medievalism in Fragments, Durham, N.C., 1997, forthcoming.
9. The Baruch trial can be found in Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier (1318-1325), ed. Jean Duvernoy, Toulouse, 1965; for the Trent trial, see Anna Esposito and Diego Quaglioni, Processi contro gli Ebrei di Trento (1475-1478), Padua, 1990; and R. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent, 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial, New Haven, 1992.
10. David-Menard (as in n. 1), 183; also, crucial to the question of pleasure/knowledge/violence, see Louise O. Fradenburg and Carla Frecerro, “The Pleasures of History,” GLQ, 1, 1995, 373-84.
11. A very important question has not yet been asked and cannot be dealt with adequately here. How did Jews engage in these inscriptional contests? At this juncture the complex story of Hebrew printing in Europe needs to be considered. In brief, 1475, the year of the Trent trial, coincided with the first publication of Hebrew incunabula in Pieve in the shadow of Padua, less than one hundred miles from Trent, as well as the first printing of Hebrew script in non-Hebrew texts in Germany. In the last quarter of the 15th century Hebrew printers could be found in the smaller provincial cities of Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Soncino, near Milan, Naples, and Brescia. Noted Hebrew printerssuch as Gerson Soncino also printed Latin and vernacular texts. Venice came to be the major site of Hebrew printing under David Bomberg, a Christian publisher from Antwerp who worked with Jewish scholars in his printing house. Such operations were always vulnerable and the Venetian republic exacted a high cost. Bomberg had to pay extortionate fees to extend his permission to print Hebrew texts, and the ambivalent attitude to Hebrew publishing flared in 1553, when a papal order condemned printed Talmuds to burning. As a starting point, consult Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605, Princeton, N.J., 1977; and David Werner Amram, The Makers of Hebrew Books in Italy, London, 1973.
12. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York, 1983.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): 1 Albrecht Altdorfer, Porch of the Regensburg Synagogue, 1519. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett (photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): 2 Altdorfer, Interior of the Regensburg Synagogue, 1519. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett (photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)

33

Be Not Afraid of the Dark by Shelley P. Haley

CHAPTER 1

Be Not Afraid of the Dark
Critical Race Theory and Classical Studies
Shelley P. Haley

Critical race theory, which began in the scholarship of jurisprudence and the theory of social construction in the 1970s, was a response to the backlash against civil rights legislation. Its oppositional stance and its use of storytelling to challenge negative portrayals of people of color hold attraction in particular for people of African descent. The justification for using a theory focused on modern phenomena like “race” and “racism” to analyze ancient Greek and Roman society is that modern interpret- ers of those ancient societies have internalized the modern values, struc- tures, and behaviors that are the object of critical race theory.
In light of literary evidence from the first centuries b.c.e. and c.e., it is plausible that the Romans were aware of skin-color difference and that it played a role, among other factors, in the social construction of difference. Given the simultaneity of other factors as well, it is important to examine the Roman construction of difference with particular attention to color, gen- der, class, and culture using a symmetrical mode of analysis. The Romans in Augustus’s day were more keenly aware of different cultural practices— especially those of African societies—than we have given them credit for up to now, as Vergil’s Aeneid and the Psuedo-Vergilian Moretum illustrate.

28 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings Introduction

Critical race theory had its beginnings in the scholarship of jurisprudence and in the sociological theory of social construction that developed in the 1970s as a response to the backlash and rollbacks of civil rights legislation. To me, as a Classical Studies scholar who is simultaneously a woman of African descent, critical race theory is appealing because of its oppositional stance and its use of storytelling to challenge negative portrayals of all people of color, but particularly people of African descent.
Critical race theory has found its way into the academy with the publication of Ladson-Billings and Tate’s article, “Towards a Critical Theory of Education.”1 In addition, critical race theory has nurtured critical race feminism, which centers on the experiential knowledge of women of color and challenges white liberal feminism and essentialist feminism. I would argue that critical race theory has also found its way into literary criticism, most notably in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark.2
Admittedly, this all sounds very twentieth and twenty-first cen- tury. How can a classicist justify using a theory so closely aligned with modern phenomena like “race,” “racism,” and “systemic oppression” to analyze the vanished societies of ancient Greece and ancient Rome? I hope to show in this chapter that my justification abides in the fact that the interpreters of these ancient societies were or are intellectuals of the nineteenth through twentieth-first centuries, and so have internalized (consciously or not) the values, structures, and behaviors that foster the need for critical race theory.
It is important to remember that critical race theory challenges the experience of whites as the norm while at the same time it centers its conceptual framework in the experiences of people of color. In its broadest possible framing, critical race theory demonstrates that there are multiple levels of meaning of race and difference and that these levels are experienced simultaneously.
1. G. Ladson-Billings and W. Tate, “Towards a Critical Theory of Educa- tion,” Teachers College Report 97 (1995): 4–68.
2. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 29

According to George J. Sefa Dei, “There is a social, political, cul- tural, and intellectual meaning of race and difference. . . . Race and racisms also work differently for groups depending on history, geog- raphy, culture, class, and gender.”3 Before we can even attempt an integrated analysis of these factors on the ancient construction of race, we must interrogate the extent to which we bring our modern “social, political, cultural, and intellectual meaning of race and difference”4 to our analyses of the ancient world. Only by acknowledging the pres- ence of this meaning can we begin to pull back the layers in order to arrive at the ancient construct of race. It certainly is not easy. How- ever, I shall present here my attempts to apply a critical race theory to begin this unlayering process.

Defining Race and Color in the Ancient Mediterranean World
In 1996, a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education called me. She was reviewing a book by a notoriously vitriolic critic of Afro- centric interpretations of “classical” history.5 The reporter called me because the author mentions my defense of the position that Cleo- patra was “black.”6 After my explanation that Cleopatra symbolizes the treatment we have received at the hands of Eurocentric patriar- chy, and that it is in this light that we embrace Cleopatra as a “sis- ter,” the reporter asked, “Symbolic construction aside, what do you tell your students regarding Cleopatra’s race?” I explained that this is a very complex question when one can ask it about Cleopatra or any ancient—or modern—historical figure. “Race” as the social and 3. George J. Sefa Dei, “Recasting Anti-Racism and the Axis of Difference: Beyond the Question of Theory,” Race, Class and Gender 7, no.2 (2000): 38–48. This particular quote is taken from the ProQuest version, 3.
4. Ibid., 4.
5. Ellen Coughlin, “Not out of Africa,” review of Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History, by Mary Lefkowitz, The Chronicle of Higher Education 16 (February 1996): A6–7.
6. Shelley P. Haley, “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering,” in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin, eds., Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York: Routledge, 1993), 23–43, especially 27–30.

30 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

ideological construct that we understand in the late twentieth century in the United States of America clearly had not been formulated in the first-century b.c.e. Mediterranean.
So my answer to the reporter and to my students and to col- leagues—whether Afrocentric or Eurocentric in standpoint—is that Cleopatra, and indeed, the people of “the ancient world,” had a “race,” but that it is anachronistic to insist that she or they had a race as we understand it. Instead, we must search out and analyze their construct of race. So, my caveat to readers of this chapter is the same. Do not read our construct of race into ancient cultures. Did the Romans con- ceptualize a phenomenon such as “racial difference”? Yes. Did the Romans notice skin-color differences? Yes. Did they attach a value to skin-color differences? That question is not answered so easily. In any society’s value system, individuals are aggregates of multiple differences; judgments are then made according to the combination. The Romans did react strongly, even prejudicially, to difference; how- ever, one cannot point just to Roman reactions to skin color, but must take into account class, gender, culture, and sexuality as well. In this chapter, I hope to demonstrate that, based on literary evidence from the first centuries b.c.e. and c.e., it is plausible (we can never know for sure) that the Romans were aware of skin color difference and that skin color was a factor in their formulation of a social construc- tion of difference. But it was one of many factors. The simultaneity of these factors is crucial to my analysis; it is, therefore, important to examine the Roman construct of difference with particular atten- tion to color, gender, class, and culture using a symmetrical, nonlinear mode of thinking. The texts on which I shall concentrate are Vergil’s Aeneid, particularly Book Four, with its familiar story of Queen Dido of Carthage, and the Pseudo-Vergilian Moretum.
Before beginning to discuss difference as constructed by the Romans, we need to establish the “norm.” Just as in the United States, when Americans say “African Americans,” they mean black men, and when they say “Americans,” they mean white men, so for the Romans, Romani meant Roman men. Roman masculinity (a social construct in and of itself) was the norm in each of the texts we shall exam- ine. Roman society was patriarchal and androcentric; the fact that the authors of the texts under examination are mostly all male reflects

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 31

that.7 Gender difference is filtered through a male lens, which is the framework for gender difference.
What color did the Romans see themselves? Was there a skin-color “norm” in Roman society? There was, in fact, a range of skin hues, and this is reflected in the skin color terminology. Albus, ater, candidus, fus- cus, and niger are all used by Roman authors to describe the skin color of peoples with whom they came in contact.8 However, it is equally important to note that there are many contexts where skin color is not mentioned at all. For example, there is no skin color given for Aeneas, Dido, or Iarbas, three central characters in Book Four of the Aeneid. In these contexts, character—or characterization—was not dependent on skin color, an attitude that ironically was Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. When the Romans did apply a skin color descriptor to them- selves it was albus. What did albus mean to a Roman?
Nineteenth-century lexicographers render albus as “white,” and candidus as “shiny or glistening white.” The opposite of albus is ater, “black” (“lusterless black”), and opposite to candidus is niger, “black” (“shiny or glistening black”). Lloyd Thompson, in Romans and Blacks, persuasively argues against the reference point of “white,” which for the modern reader in the United States connotes a Nordic or northern European coloring. As Thompson says, “no concept of ‘white’ people as a meaningful socio-cultural category could arise in Roman society. . . . The ‘developed world’ of the Roman world view was definitely the world of pale-brown Mediterraneans.”9
If, then, the reference point for albus is pale-brown, not the white of a Nordic consciousness, interpretations and reading of the other skin color terminology are transformed. Ater, candidus, fuscus, and niger become degrees of brownness. For me, candidus is reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks’s use of the term “brights” for the lighter shades of brown associ- ated with mixed-race (African-European) Americans. She says,
7. There is an outside chance that a woman authored the Moretum. However, given that there is very little surviving Roman literature authored by women, female authorship of this text is highly unlikely.
8. I am using the masculine morpheme of the adjectives, because this is the form that is traditionally listed first in lexicons and dictionaries. Feminine forms would be alba, atra, candida, fusca, and nigra.
9. Lloyd Thompson, Romans and Blacks (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 10–11.

32 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

One of the first “world”-truths revealed to me when I at last became a member of SCHOOL was that, to be socially success- ful, a little girl must be Bright (of skin). It was better if your hair was curly too—or at least Good Grade (Good Grade implied, usually, no involvement with the Hot Comb)—but Bright you marvelously needed to be.10
Fuscus, ater, and niger then become deeper shades of brown until the shade niger, which was associated with the ancient Africans. Scy- bale, the African woman in the Moretum, is described as being “of a deep brown color” (fusca colore, 1.33).11 This skin coloring is given as one of several traits, each reinforcing her African descent (Afra genus, 1.32). Cypassis, the sexually exploited hairdresser in Ovid’s Amores 2.7 and 2.8, is addressed as fusca Cypassi (2.8.22), which, given the pale-brown reference point for Ovid, should be rendered as “deep- brown Cypassis.”12 Albus is often contrasted by ater as, for example, when Cicero in Philippics 2.16 says to Marc Antony:
vide quam te amarit is qui albus aterne fuerit ignoras. Frat- ris filium praeterit. 13
Haley: See, how much that man loved you, a man about whom you do not know whether he was pale brown or dark brown. He passed over his nephew.
Or as in Catullus 93:
Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere,
nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo.14
10. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One: The Autobiography of Gwendo- lyn Brooks (Detroit: Broadside, 1972), 37.
11. Latin text from W.V. Clausen et al., eds. Appendix Vergiliana (OCT; Oxford: Clarendon, 1966).
12. Latin text from Ovid, Amores; Medicamina faciei feminae; Ars amatoria; Remedia amoris (ed. E.J. Kenney; OCT; Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
13. Latin text from Cicero, Orationes vol. 6 ed. A.C. Clark (OCT; Oxford: Clarendon,1900).
14. Latin text from Catullus, Carmina ed. R. A. B. Mynors (OCT; Oxford: Clarendon, 1958).

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 33

Haley: I’m not terribly eager to please you, Caesar, nor do I care to
know if you are pale-brown or dark brown.
Albus and ater connote a matte-like quality, whereas candidus and niger imply luster and brightness. Consequently, a graffito contrasts a can- dida (a “bright brown woman”) and a nigra (a “bright black woman”):
candida me docuit nigras
odisse puellas . . . (CIL 4.1520)15
Haley: A bright brown girl taught me to hate bright black girls.16
Based on these examples, it is plausible to assume that pale-brown was the reference point for the Roman evaluation of skin-color differences, and that skin color was one of many factors—not necessarily the most important one—in the Roman construction of difference.
As I noted before, often skin color is not mentioned, and thus was not the chief component in the construction of difference. For exam- ple, in Book Four of Vergil’s Aeneid, in the character of Dido, gender, culture, and geographical location, rather than the somatic trait of skin color, are the factors construing difference. Here, we meet the Semitic queen Dido, who founds a new city, Carthage, on the northeastern shores of Africa. By so doing, she brings together in one character all the fears of Roman ruling class men: a foreign woman with politi- cal power in a geopolitical area that, historically, produced Rome’s most tenacious and feared rivals: Hannibal (whose coming is prayed for by Dido at 4.625–30), and Cleopatra. Dido, through conflation with Cleopatra, represents the Roman male fear of the power of the “Other.” At the same time, Dido provides Vergil with an opportunity for moral didacticism. By having Aeneas abandon Dido, Vergil crafts an Aeneas who demonstrates the moral supremacy of what will be known to Vergil’s contemporaries as “old-fashioned” Roman virtues.
15. Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Zangemeister, ed., Inscriptiones Parietariae Pom- peianae, Herculanenses, Stabianae (vol. 4 of CIL; Berlin: G. Reimerus, 1871). No date is given; the following contextual information is provided: “Nunc Neapoli in museo; inter duos limites quibus rubrum tectorium distinctum est” (97).
16. The author clearly is referring to sexually mature women; he may be referring to women who are prostitutes. By labeling them “girls,” he infantilizes and devalues them further.

34 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

This moral supremacy stands in stark contrast to Marc Antony, who— according to the propaganda—surrendered to the wiles of a foreign seductress and enmeshed Rome in a messy war.
Vergil was not the only author of the Augustan age to promote a moral agenda by employing the image of the foreign seductress.17 Livy also articulates the dangers of beautiful, foreign women, most notice- ably in the case of the Carthaginian princess Sophoniba. Once again, there are parallels with both the historical and literary Cleopatra: a beautiful passionate woman of Africa who distracts a Roman—or in this case, the Roman surrogate Massinissa—from his duty to Rome.18 Through such characters, Augustan authors reinforced the need for patriarchal control of female sexuality, whether domestic or foreign. Without it, women are destructive and suspect.
Reconsidering Race and Vergil’s Dido
Vergil reinforces this position towards female sexuality through his development of Dido’s character. When first we meet her, she is the model univira—a “one-man woman”—having taken a vow of celi- bacy and fidelity to her dead husband.19 She sublimates her sexuality, diverting her energy to the founding of a city for her people. In the beginning, she embodies the solid moral and asexual character of a Roman matrona. Furthermore, like Livy’s Lucretia, she works hard for the welfare of those dependent on her. In this way, Dido recalls the one positive category of women illustrated in Semonides’ Catalogue of Women. Vergil (1.430) reinforces the parallel by using a metaphor of bees to describe the activity of the city builders. Before Aeneas arrived, Dido had rejected an offer of a marriage/political alliance from the native African prince Iarbas: she could remain sexually con- trolled and true to her vow to her deceased husband.
17. For an explanation of how a controlling image differs from a stereotype, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 67–90.
18. Shelley P. Haley, “Livy’s Sophoniba,” Classica et Mediaevalia 40 (1989): 171– 81.
19. Readers do not actually learn about this vow until the beginning of book four.

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Clearly, Dido had to change. At the beginning of the episode, she represents the ideal Roman woman. Within the frame of a misogy- nistic lens, what destroys the moral fabric of women, even seemingly good women? What is the essence of foreign women that makes them especially alien to Romans? The answer, of course, is passion and control of their sexuality. Passion was a cultural stereotype projected upon Africans by Romans and Greeks.20 Vergil moves Dido further away from Rome and closer to Africa by implicating her in the flaw of passion. In Vergil’s depiction, the emotional stress of coping with the eruption of her repressed sexuality and the moral pressure of break- ing a sacred vow drives Dido toward madness. This, in turn, deepens her “Otherness,” distancing Dido from the ideal Roman woman. As her madness grows, she is drawn towards indigenous African cultural practices, which bring her comfort. By rejecting Roman and Tyrian religious rituals, she alienates herself further from the Roman male audience.
There are two fascinating elements in Vergil’s development of this progression. First, he reveals an awareness of African rituals and cultural values, and second, nearly all interpreters of the Aeneid have ignored or dismissed this awareness. They tend to follow the paradigm that Toni Morrison discusses in Playing in the Dark by reading Vergil’s “Africanism”21 out of his epic.
For example, in many precolonial, West African societies, women did not achieve any significant status until they became mothers. Through motherhood, women gained political, social, and economic power. Among ancient African societies, and especially in ancient Egypt, motherhood was also highly valued, conferring political and religious power upon women. While it is true that under Augus- tus motherhood was touted as the most valuable role for Roman women, no political or economic power accrued to them because of it. Certainly, mothers of the elite class had social and even political influence, but not power. Viewed from the African cultural valuation of motherhood, Dido’s wish for a “little Aeneas” takes on further
20. Shelley P. Haley, “Livy, Passion, and Cultural Stereotypes,” Historia 39 (1990): 375–81.
21. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6–10.

36 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

significance. The following lines are usually read as a last desperate attempt by a frantic, spurned lover to keep her faithless lover with her just long enough to leave her with a token reminder of the love they shared:
Haley:
Saltem si qua mihi de te suscepta fuisset
ante fugam suboles, si quis mihi parvulus aula luderet Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret,
non equidem omnino capta ac deserta viderer. (Aen. 4.327–330)
If only I had conceived a child by you before your flight, if some small Aeneas played in my courtyard who, despite everything, resembles you in looks, then I’d feel less like one taken and discarded.
This futile plea is viewed as another indication of Dido’s deteriorat- ing mental state: no successful, sane woman-ruler would want to be a mother. Such an interpretation comes from a social theoretical stance that devalues motherhood and discredits matrifocality.22 But from an Afrocentric perspective, Dido’s lines can be read not only as a wish but also as a need: to come into her fullest power both as a ruler and as a human—Dido must be a mother. This interpretation is reinforced further by the encouragement Dido’s sister Anna gives her to pursue a relationship with Aeneas:
22. Matrifocality, especially as a trait of African or African-descended soci- eties, has been pathologized and bestialized by white men. For an example of this in Classical studies, see Thomas Fleming’s review of Judith P. Hallett, Fathers and Daughters in Rome: Women and the Elite Family in The Classical Journal 82, no.1 (1986):
The term matrifocal was coined to describe the situation of Carib- bean Black societies in which women are often abandoned by their husbands or lovers and find themselves compelled to exercise a sort of matriarchal authority over their family. . . . (Some primatologists use matrifocal to describe the life of chimpanzees, whose only endur- ing bonds are based on maternity.) It is completely illegitimate to take a term of social pathology and apply it to the ordinary conditions of Roman life—unless Hallett means to suggest that Roman society was organized matricentrically like that of the chimpanzee. (p. 77)

Haley:

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 37

solane perpetua maerens carpere iuventa,
nec dulcis natos, Veneris nec praemia noris? (Aen. 4.32–33)
Why, alone, do you squander your youth always—grieving without sweet sons or the gifts of love?
The “sweet sons” would confer status and a mother’s power upon her, as well as provide companions and heirs. Taken this way, Dido has not yet totally abrogated her sense of self to her love of Aeneas. This is not to discount the desperation of her pleas; that is certainly there. However, the motivation for the desperation varies depending on the reader’s perspective.
It is important to note that mention of skin color is absent. In the character of Dido, gender, culture, and geographical location, rather than the somatic trait of skin color, are factors in construing differ- ence. If Dido had belonged to the gene pool for which “having fair hair and skin and usually light eyes”23 is the norm, then it seems to me that Vergil, whose reference point is candidus (pale brown), would have found that remarkable and would have mentioned it when we first encounter Dido. However, he does not describe her physically at all, making it all the more plausible that Vergil conceived of Dido as what I call the “beautiful norm”: southern Mediterranean and Semitic women who were candidae, with black hair, pale-brown skin, and dark eyes.24
Therefore, why then does Vergil describe Dido as having “yellow hair” (flaventis abscissa comas, 4.590; and nondum illi flavum Proserpina crinem/abstulerat Stygioque caput damnaverat Orco, 4.698–99)? Let us review what has taken place: (1) Dido has fallen in lust with Aeneas, perhaps under the influence of Venus; (2) She has consummated what
23. William Morris, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 142 (under the entry for “blond”).
24. After all, Dido is, in Vergil’s vision, Semitic. Of course, we must not for- get that Dido is a fictional character, a product of Vergil’s imagination. What is the plausibility that blondes (or redheads, for that matter) were so deeply embed- ded in Vergil’s consciousness as standards of beauty, that they would enter his fantasy? Dido is not believable as anything other than the beautiful norm men- tioned above.

38 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

she believes is a marriage with Aeneas; (3) She catches him being, in the words of Tina Turner, a typical male: he’s about to abandon and jilt her. She does not want Aeneas to go, and she wants a child. Using that desire explicitly, she pleads with Aeneas to stay long enough to make her pregnant.
When it is clear that personal appeals have no effect on Aeneas’s resolve, Dido turns not to Greek or Roman religious rites, but rather to indigenous religious practices. The usual interpretation of Dido’s consultation with an African priestess and her subsequent augury ritual is that they are further indications of Dido’s deepening descent into madness and irrationality. As far as I know, no commentator has considered that these rituals may have been more familiar or more comforting to Dido. None has considered the parallels between tra- ditional African religions (and their permutations in the Diaspora) and the advice and rituals delineated in Book Four. Vergil describes the priestess as a member of the “Massylian people” (Massylae gentis, 1.483); her home is the “westernmost boundary of the Ethiopians” (ultimus Aethiopum locus est, 1.481); before Dido notices her, she was guardian of the temple of the Hesperides, and she was minister to the “serpent” (draconi, 1.484). I would like to suggest that this priest- ess was from an ethnic group that might have been the ancestors of the Maasai. Migration would account for the current home of the Maasai in east Africa. Furthermore, I would suggest that this African woman was a priestess of a religion with strong parallels to the tra- ditional African religions, especially as practiced by the Yoruba, and that the serpent is the symbolic representation of a major divinity of this religion.25
The advice that the unnamed priestess gives Dido follows the charms and spells of vodoun, santeria, and other African-derived religions. One important aspect of ritual in some traditional African religions involves dousing the worshippers and presiders with a yel- low mud made from ochre. I suggest also that Dido has been doused
25. The connection between the serpent and the divinity is clearest in voud- oun, where one of the chief spirits, Damballah, comes in the form of a serpent or snake. Vodoun is a variation of Yoruba religion. Both religions employ priestesses as well as priests.

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 39

with a similar mud, hence the description of her as having yellow hair (flaventis abscissa comas, l.590). Translators render flaventis as “golden” or “yellow,” but the word is a participial adjective from the verb flaveo, “to be yellow,” so that in line 590 there is a sense that Dido’s hair has just become yellow. Furthermore, the adjective fla- vus can refer to the coloring that comes from the “puzzolan earth” associated with the Tiber River. (Vergil uses flavus in this way in 7.31, Tiberinus . . . multa flavus harena). It is crucial to keep in mind that since Dido is Semitic and has been described as “beautiful” by a poet whose reference point for skin color is pale brown, it is highly unlikely that Dido’s natural or even usual hair color is “golden” or “yellow.” Flaventis seems to refer to an action; given the context of the ritual in which she has participated, and which was performed by an African priestess with connections to traditional African prac- tices, it is plausible that Dido’s hair has become yellow because of a ritualistic dousing of ochre mud.
Vergil reveals his knowledge not only of the different ethnic and linguistic groups in Italy (book twelve), but also those in Africa. Near the beginning of book four, Anna lists the geographical neighbors of Dido’s newly founded city. For each, there is a cultural or national stereotype: the Gaetulians are “invincible in war” (genus insuperabile bello); the Numidians are “unbridled” (infreni), an epithet which con- jures up their cultural stereotype of being passionate and oversexed; and finally the nomads of Barca are perceived as “wild” (furentes).26 Most important for our purposes, however, is the introduction of a specific suitor who was rejected by Dido: Iarbas, the Gaetulian. Iarbas here is presented as one of several leaders “whom Africa—rich and proud—nourished” (quos Africa terra triumphis divis alit, 1.36), but whom Dido still rejected.
According to Vergil, Iarbas27 is the product of the rape of a Gara- mantine nymph by the northern African god Ammon who, in the syncretism with Greco-Roman religious tradition, became associated with Zeus/Jupiter. There was a shrine to Zeus Ammon at Dodona,
26. See again Haley, “Livy, Passion”, 375–81.
27. The name Iarbas occurs at three places in Roman literature: Vergil, Aeneid, 4.36; Ovid, Fasti, 3.552; and Juvenal, The Satires, 5.45; italics added.

40 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

which was, like Delphi, an oracular shrine. Iarbas is credited with introducing the worship of Ammon to the Numidians.
Vergil gives no physical description of Iarbas; what is important to Vergil’s intentions is how Iarbas will move the story along. Con- sequently, he is described in terms of Dido’s actions. He is scorned (despectus), even though he is the child of a divine parent and a rich and powerful ruler. Dido rejects Iarbas not because he is African per se, nor because he is inferior in terms of class. Succinctly put, Iarbas is scorned because he is a man. By accepting his proposal—and Vergil implies that it was one of the first that Dido received—Dido would violate her sacred vow of heterosexual celibacy. Iarbas can accept her decision as long as she rejects all men. However, when she accepts the proposal of, or rather does the proposing to, a man inferior in nearly every way to Iarbas, he, relying on parental loyalty, berates Jupiter for allowing this to happen and seeks redress.
However, in the Roman construction of the foreign woman, Dido’s vow and her strict observance of it, or of any vow, is unnatural. It is only a matter of time before she reveals her natural, perfidious char- acter. She becomes what all women would be without the strict reins of patriarchy: mad, out of control, and destructive. Dido, in a sense, foreshadows later stereotypes of women of color, particularly of black women. While I am not arguing here that Dido was the definitive ante- cedent for the stereotype of the foreign seductress, I am interested in what happens when readers and interpreters of the ancient texts come out of intellectual traditions and societal constructions that acquiesce to these stereotypes. Wole Soyinka is quoted as saying:
We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit our- selves to a second epoch of colonialism—this time by a univer- sal humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehen- sion of their world, and their history, and their social neuroses, and their value systems.28
28. Ketu H. Katrak, “Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Post-colo- nial Women’s Texts,” in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 256; italics added.

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 41 I would argue that this recolonizing occurs in Classical studies.
Race and Gender in Pseudo-Vergil’s Moretum
Images of black womanhood are part of a generalized ideology of domi- nation. The ability to form and control images of black womanhood— that is, the authority to define these symbols—is a major instrument of power. In order to exercise power, elite white men and their rep- resentatives must be in a position to manipulate appropriate symbols concerning black women. They may do so by exploiting already exist- ing symbols. I would like to suggest that this manipulation of symbols occurs even when such symbols are encountered in ancient texts. The ancient text then becomes the validation of a stereotype that is, in fact, alien—“other”—to the ancient society. This is particularly true of the physical stereotype of black women.
As seen from the foregoing discussion, I do not imply that no cultural or social stereotypes existed for women, whether African, Greek, or Roman, in the ancient world. One can see that, from Roman literature, Dido has come to represent the most persistent cultural stereotype for foreign women: the seductress, or “Jezebel.” She is the sultry enticer who disrupts the social and moral order with her sexuality. Nevertheless, I suggest that our understandings of the life experiences and images of ancient African women need revision, since scholars who have studied them were and are operat- ing under the influence of physical and sexual stereotypes prevalent today.
Nowhere in Roman literature is the intersection of color, ethnic ori- gin, gender, and class better represented than in the pseudo-Vergilian Moretum. This poem of 123 dactylic hexameters gives a detailed physical description of an African woman of the peasant class. Most scholarly attention has centered on the authorship of the piece, and once its attribution to Vergil was deemed implausible, it was forgotten and received little attention. However, in recent times, with renewed interest in the somatic and cultural diversity of the ancient Mediter- ranean world, Scybale, the African woman in question, has attracted more attention. Frank Snowden praises the author of the Moretum for the congruence of his or her description with the racial characteristics

42 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

delineated by modern physical anthropologists. He remarks, “The author of the Moretum who described Scybale would be rated today as a competent anthropologist.”29
I provide the Latin and my translation of the description of Scy- bale. It is important to note that most translations of this piece have been done by men influenced by stereotypical descriptions of the phy- sique of African women. Consequently, I have deliberately made my rendering as sensitive to black-feminist and female-empowering con- cerns as the Latin will allow:
Haley:
Erat unica custos,
Afra genus, tota patriam testante figura,
torta comam, labroque tumens et fusca colore,
pectore lata, iacens mammis, compressior alvo,
cruribus exilis, spatiosa prodiga planta. (Moretum 31–35)
She was his only companion, African in her race, her whole form a testimony to her country: her hair twisted into dreads, her lips full, her color dark, her chest broad, her breasts flat, her stomach flat and firm, her legs slender, her feet broad and ample.
Needless to say, the Moretum is not now part of the Classical canon, but recently whenever the racial composition of ancient Greece or Rome is discussed, scholars always find it. Once again, men have over- analyzed this passage, and although I have respect for the conclusions reached by Lloyd Thompson, in particular, in his book Romans and Blacks, he, like other male scholars both black and white, has been imprinted with the physical and sexual stereotypes of black women. As a point of comparison with my translation, here are the transla- tions of Snowden and Thompson, two black male scholars:
Snowden: African in her race, her whole figure proof of her country—
her hair tightly curled, lips thick, color dark,
29. Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 9. Most contemporary physical anthropologists reject both the ideology and the determinants of “scientific races.”

Thompson:
chest broad, breasts pendulous, belly somewhat pinched,
legs thin, and feet broad and ample.30
She was his only help.
She was African in stock, and all her physical
features gave testimony of her land of origin: tightly-curled hair, swollen lips, dusky complexion, broad chest with low-swinging breasts, belly rather
pinched,
thin legs, broad and ample feet.31
For our purposes, this passage illustrates one very crucial point. Who- ever the author of the Moretum was, she or he had detailed physical knowledge of Africans, in particular African women. The author also assumes that her/his audience has had enough contact with Africans to appreciate how Scybale’s physical traits testify to her being of African descent (Afra genus). We can make the important inference that Africans were not a rare spectacle for at least some portion of the Roman populace. If such intimacy of physical contact existed, then detailed knowledge of cultural and ritualistic practices becomes even more plausible. While Scybale is a fictional character—and it is important to remember that—I believe that she is sympathetically drawn.32
Despite this, Scybale has not fared well at the hands of most classi- cal scholars. The last two translations cited above have been influenced by the stereotypical descriptions of the physique of black women. Snowden’s “pendulous breasts” and Thompson’s “low-swinging” ones
30. Ibid., 6.
31. Thompson, Romans and Blacks, 31.
32. Every indication is that Scybale is the equal of the peasant Simylus, with
whom she lives and for whom she cares. Others disagree. Thompson thinks the author is mocking Scybale, ibid., 136. Jehan Desanges thinks the name is a play on the Greek word for “dung” and so it suggests “rubbish,” “shit,” or “riff-raff,” and as such is, perhaps, a commentary on her color. Jehan Desanges, “l’Afrique noire et le monde mediterraneen dans l’antiquite: Ethiopiens et Greco-romains,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I, From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire (Menil Foundation), ed. Jean Devisse, Jean Marie Courtes, Ladislas Bugner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 409–11.
Be Not Afraid of the Dark
Z 43

44 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

are reminiscent of a description from 1837 of a “Hottentot” woman.33 Many white male observers and scholars seem to have had a curious preoccupation with black women’s breasts. Francis Moore, who first published his travelogue of Africa in 1738, included this description of Gambian women: “large breasts, thick lips and broad nostrils, are esteemed extreamly [sic] beautiful. One breast is generally larger than the other.”34
In the treatment of ancient texts, modern scholars have assumed that ancient Romans would have found the breasts of African women “disgusting.” David Wiesen comments upon Juvenal 13.162– 63 (quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus aut quis/in Meroe crasso maiorem infante mamillam?35) that, “a huge-breasted African woman nursing her fat child would have been an amazing, perhaps disgust- ing sight to a Roman viewer.”36 Thompson agrees with Wiesen on this point, stating, “According to a widely held Roman view, the somatic ‘defects’ of the Aethiops somatic type comprised colour, hair, facial shape, and over-large breasts in the female of the genus.”37 When scholars cite these lines as “evidence” for the physical characteristics of African women, they seem to forget that Juvenal is writing satire, a genre which requires the poetic device of hyperbole. He, like Lucre- tius before him,38 is listing the varieties of the human condition and observing that there is nothing surprising about any of them in their own context.
33. J.J. Virey, Histoire Naturelle du Genre Humane (Paris: 1810) [Natural History of the Negro Race], J. H. Guenbault, trans. (Charleston, S.C.: D. J. Dowl- ing, 1837), 13: “[Hottentot women] can suckle a child on their back, by throw- ing the breast over their shoulders.”
34. Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London: Edward Cave, 1738). Online: http://people.uvawise.edu/runaways/lit/moore.html; this edition was published in 1767.
35. “Who is amazed by a throat goiter in the Alps or who is amazed by a breast larger than a chubby baby in Meroe?”
36. David S. Weisen, “Juvenal and the Blacks,” Classica et Mediaevalia 31 (1970): 145.
37. Thompson, Romans and Blacks, 35.
38. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 4.1160–69, especially 1168: at tumida et mammosa ‘Ceres’ est ‘ipsa ab Iaccho.’ (But the plump and busty one is “Ceres her- self [being suckled] by Bacchus.”) Lucretius is speaking of how love transforms blemishes into beauty marks in the eyes of the lover.

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 45

So, he says, there is nothing surprising about throat goiters in the Alps, Germans with their hair twisted into greasy horns, or Mero- etic women with breasts larger than their fat babies. It is clear that Juvenal is exaggerating to make his point. No one now believes that throat goiters are an ethnic characteristic of the French and Swiss; no one travels to Germany expecting to see people with their hair twisted into greasy horns. Why, then, does the leading commenta- tor on Juvenal, Edward Courtney, remark on Juvenal 13.163, “Large pendulous breasts are common in negro women”?39 Furthermore, Wiesen’s comment on this line (cited earlier) takes Juvenal’s hyper- bole as a point of fact. Juvenal’s point is that large breasts on any woman would have been surprising to a Roman. Incidentally, it is a flaw of the male-centered perspective of these scholars that none notes the fact that in these examples, the women are lactating. Lac- tating women of all races have fuller, larger breasts than when they are not lactating.
Because Scybale’s depiction is part of a text that today is decid- edly marginal, Classical scholars sometimes turn to handbooks to read a general description of the work. How does Scybale fare in these reference works? In A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age (1910), J. Wight Duff describes Scybale as “the ugly, old, negress who is his [the peasant Simylus’s] house- keeper.”40 H. J. Rose describes her in A Handbook of Latin Literature (1936) as, “an old negress who comprises his entire household.”41 Paul Harvey comments in the 1937 edition of the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, “[The Moretum] vividly describes a peasant rising . . . and preparing his meal with the help of his old negress servant.”42 M. C. Howatson’s 1989 edition of the same reference work renders Scybale invisible: “It [the Moretum] vividly describes
39. Edward Courtney, A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (London: Athlone, 1980), 554.
40. J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age (London: T. F. Unwin, 1910), 358.
41. H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Latin Literature: From the Earliest Times to the Death of St. Augustine (London: Methuen & Co., 1936), 265.
42. Paul Harvey, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), 280.

46 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

the farmer rising early on a winter morning . . . and preparing his meal, then starting his day’s work at the plough.”43 Thompson (1989) describes Scybale as “the slave and sole house companion of a simple peasant.”44 I have searched these lines and the remaining hexameters of the poem. There are no indications that she is old or ugly or a slave. She only becomes ugly if the beholder has been socialized to believe that African physiognomy is ugly. No commentator raises the possibility that the peasant Simylus and Scybale might be com- panions out of mutual affection.45 It is also clear that Scybale is not sexualized the way that Dido or the black and pale-brown women of Pompeian graffiti are. Rather, she is asexual and in this regard she resembles the controlling image of the mammy/Aunt Jemima figure in the United States.
What other examples are there of modern stereotypes intrud- ing upon the analysis of ancient women? I found it fascinating that when we have evidence that ancient men from Italy or Greece love women of color, many male scholars assume that the women are pros- titutes. There are two inscriptions from Pompeii that deal with such relationships.
Haley:
Candida me doCvit nigras
OdIsse Pvellas; odero; sepotero; sed non InvItvs Amabo;
SCripsit Venus; FisiCa; Pompeiana. (CIL 4.1520)
A bright pale-brown woman taught me to hate bright black women
I would hate them if I could; but not unwilling I will love them.46
43. M. C. Howatson, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 45.
44. Thompson, Ibid., 30.
45. Could the Anglo-American fear of miscegenation be lurking behind the omission of this possibility?
46. Cf. Ovid, Amores, 3.11b.35:
Luctantur pectusque leve in contraria tendunt
hac amor hac odium, sed, puto, vincit amor.
odero, si potero; si non, invitus amabo. (Italics added.) Haley’s translation:

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 47 The second is strikingly reminiscent of the Sable Venus Ode;47 with
my translation, it reads:
Haley:
Quisquis amat nigra(m) nigris carbonibus ardet. Nigra(m) cum video mora libenter edo. (CIL
4.6892 )
Whoever loves a bright black woman burns with black coals.
When I see a bright black woman, I gladly eat blackberries.
Compare the following translations:
Thompson: Any man who loves a black girl is set on fire by hot charcoal flames;
when I see a black girl I am ready and willing to eat that blackberry.48
Wick (an epigrapher and commentator on this inscription):
. . . se . . . nigras omnino timere et adversus eas mora edere
solere tamquam amuletum fassus est.49
Love and hate struggle over my fickle heart and pull it—Love in one direc- tion, Hate in the other—but Love, I think, is winning. I would hate if I could; if not, I will love unwilling. (Italics added.)
47. The Sable Venus Ode (circa 1777), in Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (1801): 32–38:
Next comes a warmer race, from sable sprung,
To love each thought, to lust each nerve is strung; The Samboe dark, and Mullattoe brown,
The Mestize fair, the well-limb’d Quaderoon, And jetty Afric, from no spurious sire,
Warm as her soil, and as her sun—on fire.
These sooty dames, well vers’d in Venus’ school, Make love an art, and boast they kiss by rule.
48. Thompson, Romans and Blacks, 108.

48 Z Prejudice and Christian Beginnings

Haley: He confesses that he really fears black girls and usually eats
blackberries as a protection against them.
Note that quisquis can be either feminine or masculine, but both Thompson and Wick assume it refers to a man.
Thompson assumes that the bright-black women (“girls,” as he puts it) in both these inscriptions are prostitutes. In his note on 6892, he elaborates as follows:
The author may have been a slave; nigra in the context of a group of prostitutes in a brothel, as in this particular case, can hardly refer to any but an exotic or rare type of physical appearance: the scribbler’s sentiments presuppose such a rare type as distinct from a merely dark-skinned girl or a brunette, and so the graffito should be taken as alluding either to black prostitutes in gen- eral or to a particular black prostitute. But in any case it clearly exudes sexual curiosity and emphasizes the exoticism of one or more black prostitutes (probably slave girls) as sex objects offer- ing a rare experience in Pompeian brothels.50
It is important to note that Thompson is the same commentator who interprets Scybale as a slave. For him, a black woman must be a slave; if she is loved, she must be a prostitute. But there is nothing in inscrip- tion 6892 to indicate this; there is no way to know the ethnicity of the authors of 6892 or 1520. The author of 1520 might well have been a black man. Is there any textual evidence to support prostitution in either of these cases? The attribution of Venus Fisica in 1520 might arguably indicate a brothel, and the physical context of the inscription cannot be firmly determined. The inscriptions apparently were not found on the walls of brothels.51 In all probability, there were some black women who were prostitutes. But to read all black women from an ancient context as prostitutes is indicative of racist and sexist atti- tudes not of the ancient society, but of the modern reader.
49. CIL 4.6892, 721.
50. Thompson, Romans and Blacks, 210–11.
51. The only commentary on 6892 regards orthography: litteris cursivis magnis et pulchris.

Conclusions
In conclusion, there is evidence in the Roman literature of the Augustan age and later that the Romans were acute observers of color, gender, and class difference. For instance, there is evidence that ancient Roman men feared female sexuality, but that sexuality is not necessarily colorized. Indeed, all women arouse such fear. In morally didactic texts like those of Vergil and Livy, the foreign woman with political power offers the greatest threat, but once she is subsumed into the domestic sphere, like Scybale, she becomes asexual and less of a threat. However, powerful foreign women distract the Roman man/hero (or his representative) from his virtus (“manly virtue”) and officium (“duty”) with their exotic sexuality.
Clearly, each of these differences carried varying value, and their intersection and simultaneity carried yet another value. It is too sim- plistic to assume that the Romans had no skin color prejudice; it is equally simplistic to assume that all women were perceived as Roman women. The Romans were more keenly aware of different cultural practices—especially those of African societies—than we have previ- ously recognized. This should not be surprising, since Roman society at the time of Augustus was multilayered and complexly multicul- tural. As we discover the extent of that complexity, critical race theory can help to unlayer the intersectionality of the constructs of ancient Roman society.

Be Not Afraid of the Dark Z 49

34

Kennedy, Rebecca. n.d. “Classics at the Intersections: Is There a ‘race’ or ‘Ethnicity’ in Greco-Roman Antiquity?” Classics at the Intersections (blog). Accessed June 16, 2020. https://rfkclassics.blogspot.com/2019/04/is-there-race-or-ethnicity-in-greco.html.

Is there a ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ in Greco-Roman Antiquity?

According to this chart, I am Roman and I plan on applying for an Italian passport now.

As some readers of this blog know, I am currently working on a book that has been about 10 years in the making–a discussion of race and ethnicity in Greco-Roman antiquity and some of its modern implications and complications (I talked about it with Elton Barker of Classics Confidential in Jan.). The book is yet untitled (I am trusting the people at Johns Hopkins University Press who get paid to come up with cool titles to help me out). One of the primary points of this blog is to give me a space to work through my research in a less formal setting as I try to figure out just what it is that I want to say and, of course, just what I think is happening in the past.

This is also something that I am fortunate to be able to do with students as well since I get to teach my research and the kids these days are really good at helping me see things from different angles. And I am also fortunate in having this space where I can work on improving how I communicate my scholarship to wider audiences than what scholars normally aim at (i.e. the 6 people in the field who work on our specific areas).

Anyway, back in January, I tried working through some of the issues with talking about ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in antiquity and how it is historically contingent and what that means. As I work through writing the introduction to the book, I’ve given it some more thought. This is where I’ve gotten to (and it is likely not the final word). You’ll see that I have a different approach than previous scholars who have discussed race in antiquity, though it won’t be surprising to anyone who has studied contemporary race.

My question for today is ‘can we even talk about race and ethnicity in greco-roman antiquity?’ Obviously, enter any room and ask this and you will get numerous yeses and probably more nos. More importantly, there are likely in any room a dozen different definitions of race and ethnicity floating around and so when we speak of whether it exists in antiquity, we aren’t all really sure what we are considering.

RACE

Let’s start with ‘race’ since it has the longer, more complex history and because I really want to focus on it and just talk a little bit about ethnicity. And, because, ‘race’ as a concept has been around as long as the discipline of classics (way longer, in fact) and has been intertwined in its study and place in both the university and the popular imagination. And yet, what it has meant and how it has been applied as a concept has changed over time and its connections to classics erased or obscured.

Ways to talk about race in Antiquity

Option 1. Modern ‘somatic’ or ‘epidermal’ race: restoring color to the ancient world; valid–the history of the disciplines of ancient and medieval studies has been to exclude and erase people of color from the ancient Mediterranean.

Option 2. Race more as a technology that structures human interactions and embeds prejudices against racialized peoples into systems of oppression– there are three things: human difference, prejudice, and race: race is the institutionalization of prejudice based on moving signifiers for human difference. Sometimes this involves the biological, sometimes not–I’ll explain this approach in a few minutes.

Let’s start with Option 1, since this has been something of the way that ‘race’ is typically discussed in association with antiquity. Here we see the history of whitewashing the ancient Mediterranean at play. What do I mean–let’s ask Bernard Knox:

“The critics [of the classics and the ‘western canon’] seem, at first sight, to have a case. The characteristic political unit of classical Greek society–the polis, or city-state–was very much a man’s club; even in its most advanced form, Athenian democracy, it relegated its women to silence and anonymity. Racism in our sense was not a problem of the Greeks; their homogenous population afforded no soil on which that weed could easily grow” (12).

What did this ‘homogenous population’ look like? Here is Knox again:

“In spite of recent suggestions that they came originally from Ethiopia, it is clear, from their artistic representations of their own and other races, that they were undoubtedly white or, to be exact, a sort of Mediterranean olive color.”

Lots to unpack here–like the assumption that discussions surrounding African origins of some aspects of Greek culture (to which Knox is responding) is deemed impossible, that ‘olive’ is ‘white’, that everyone who considered themselves Greek looked the same, and that this ‘Greekness’ was something that made them feel homogenous. It hardly seems possible if you know anything about the ancient Mediterranean (or Greek history).

Generally, for Knox, the Greeks are white, the Romans are white, Asia and N. Africa are white. The ancient Mediterranean was ‘white’. And it was homogenously white, which meant that ‘racism’ could not creep in. Knox, and the many classicists who preceded and follow him, did not ‘see race’ in antiquity because they assume that race means somatic/epidermal (and is limited to black and white) and also because they only studied a limited scope of classical texts that do not much talk about skin color and, of course, spent very little time with ancient representations that weren’t white marble.

The assumption they made from these texts and selective artifacts was that, much as had been handed down to them from 19th century scholars, anyone whom we might call a person of color today was rare and far between in the ancient Greco-Roman world (despite spanning 3 continents) and any discussion of ‘race’ other than to mean ‘white people’ and ‘black people’ was anachronistic–this was despite the meticulous work previously by Frank Snowden and Lloyd Thompson on the prevalence of black Africans in Greek and Roman contexts (and the texts themselves and artifacts make it clear they were engaging with a myriad of peoples as far away as India).

It’s important to note that Knox gave this lecture, which was eventually published as “The Oldest Dead White European Males”, as a response to the Black Athena controversy, in which Martin Bernal argued for the roots of numerous Greek cultural institutions in Africa.

As Denise McCoskey has written in “Black Athena, White Power” in Eidolon (Nov 15, 2018), the response of the classics community to the challenge of Black Athena was a ‘failure’. The failure was this:

“…by relegating Black Athena to the sphere of “identity politics” and “culture wars,” such outrage strategically allowed Classics to evade the many serious intellectual challenges posed by Black Athena.”

And that failure, McCoskey suggests, helped make classics all the more appealing to white supremacism. McCoskey concludes in her essay:

“Given such profound contradictions, classicists’ treatment of race in the aftermath of Black Athena was the epitome of self-deception and bad faith. For even as they implicitly endorsed conceptions of Greek Whiteness, classicists adopted a widespread consensus, one that lasted for decades, that the terminology of race was simply not applicable to the ancient world.”

Of course, McCoskey is talking mostly about blackness and whiteness as they can be applied to antiquity–McCoskey rejects whiteness in antiquity, but seems to maintain blackness as a viable category. It is an attempt to add the color back to the ancient Mediterranean, something that people still fight about (especially concerning Cleopatra), despite its being closer to reality.

Perhaps, the most fruitful discussion of ‘re-coloring’ the ancient world as a practice of ‘racing the classics’ has come from Shelley Haley (“Be Not Afraid of the Dark” among others ), while others, for examples, like Frank Snowden and Lloyd Thompson (and now Sarah Derbew) worked to explore representations of blackness in ancient Greek and Roman contexts. In these cases, we see the evidence clearly that the ancient Mediterranean was filled full of people of different skin tones. And, if we can trust the scene in Aeschylus’ Suppliants (among others), when skin color is marked out in a text, it is not (usually) held up for ridicule or engendering prejudice (see the current controversy over the Sorbonne production)–notice here the focus is on clothing (and other customs), not on the fact that the women are black skinned, even though they specifically refer to themselves as melanthes earlier:

King Pelasgos: This group that we address is unhellenic, luxuriating in barbarian finery and delicate cloth. What country do they come from? The women of Argos, indeed of all Greek lands, do not wear such clothes. It is astonishing that you dare to travel to this land, fearlessly, without heralds, without sponsors, without guides. And yet here are the branches of suppliants, laid out according to custom next to you in front of the assembled gods. This alone would assert your Greekness…(Aesch. Suppliants 234-45; trans. Kennedy, Roy, and Goldman).

The work of re-coloring the ancient Mediterranean from the whitewashing it has received by generations of scholars is necessary. But is it the best approach to race in antiquity or could this ‘re-coloring’ be done under the term ‘ethnicity’ or just ‘reality’? This is something that needs to be judged on an individual basis by scholars–so long as we inhabit a landscape in which the question of Kleopatra’s possible blackness continues to elicit vitriolic racist responses, then the re-coloring of the ancient world should continue. And I know from conversations with colleagues teaching at the K-12 level that there is great benefit as a person of color today to see oneself in an world that has long been claimed as the legacy of whiteness.  The question is, though, does it need to happen under the term ‘race’?

This is a very popular image
for lectures and books on race
and ethnicity in antiquity.

Do we run the risk of reasserting a biological reality to ‘race’ if we define race in our studies of the ancient world as the very particular contemporary version of ‘epidermal race’ or ‘physiological race’? Do we reinforce the idea that ‘racing’ antiquity means finding non-white people when we make posters or books covers with the same janiform image over and over again? I worry about this.

What about Option 2?

Perhaps more important to understanding whether there can be a concept of race in antiquity–or even outside of the confines of the transatlantic slave trade and modern scientific racism–is to understand that race is NOT a content signifier, but a structuring mechanism for varying content over different times and spaces. I’ve found Falguni Sheth’s Towards a Political Philosophy of Race (2009) really useful for thinking about this:

“Why wasn’t race considered an intrinsic feature of law? Of political institutions? Of political frameworks? For example, in much of the literature on race across the natural and cognitive sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, the “reality” of race is still being discussed in terms of biology, empirical trends, government policies, philosophical arguments, or cultural discourse. Each of these is crucial to debating the reality of race, as well as racism and its pervasiveness. But what about the underlying framework makes the concepts of “race” and “racializing” possible? What about the discourse on race, as it has been conducted in the United States over the last 200 years, determines and re-produces certain anchors by which race is understood? Correlatively, how does this discourse obscure new, possibly more accurate ways by which to consider race, the racializing of various populations, and the way that race-thinking fundamentally infuses the most “race-neutral” of political and legal institutions? (Sheth, 2009, 3).

Sheth continues to consider how race theory in the US has been impacted by the legacy of African slavery and warns against reducing race to a black-white phenomenon only.

“Theoretical frameworks for race are also unsatisfying. We know that the legacy of slavery in the United States has viscerally affected the way that “Americans” think about race. Black–White relations often tend to determine the dynamics and general boundaries of race discourse. Yet, the presence of American Indians, Mexicans and “Californios,”the entrance of indentured servants from China and Japan, as well as continual immigration from other parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East should influence how we understand the dynamic structures and production of race.”

Recognizing the limitations of defining race through modern slavery does not diminish the impact of this particular manifestation of race and racialization; rather, it helps understand better the mechanisms that allow anti-blackness to continue to be perpetuated as a tool for racism in the US and elsewhere. If we understand, as Sheth does, race not as a ‘descriptive modifier’, but as “a mode or vehicle of division, separation, hierarchy, exploitation”, we can see better how institutions that seem to be, as she calls it ‘race neutral’, are actually how race itself functions. And this explains also why scientific racism reached its peak in power not while slavery was still legal, but as part of the Redemption period and Jim Crow (from the 1880s; I recommend Henry Louis Gates Jr’s new Stony the Road book on this period as well as Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction).

Sheth’s questions also allow us to see the functioning of race in antiquity as well as in the medieval world, as the work of Geraldine Heng and Dorothy Kim demonstrates. Here is Heng on the topic:

“Race” is one of the primary names we have—a name we retail for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes—that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. Race-making thus operates as specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for different treatment. My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content” (Heng, Invention of Race, 3).

These approaches to race are far more accurate and productive for thinking not only about the medieval worlds, but also the modern and the ancient. So, where might we see ‘race’ in this configuration as a tool for organizing human difference into hierarchies and oppressions in antiquity that can shift through time and space as the conditions of the processing of and attitudes towards and power structures surrounding human difference shift?

Race in Antiquity?

One theory that is often considered a source of racism or ‘race’ in antiquity is environmental determinism as found represented in the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places, Aristotle, and Vitruvius. Possible, but it’s not a fully developed ‘theory’ that actually structures hierarchies. Here are some key passages from the theory–you can see the beginnings of what will become a foundation for scientific racism in the 19th century, but it isn’t quite there in antiquity.

Here’s the Hippocratic version (5th century BCE):

This is why I think the physiques of Europeans show more variety than those of Asians and why their stature changes even from city to city. The thickened seed is more prone to flaws and irregularities when the seasons change more frequently than when they remain constant. The same logic holds for character. In such inconsistent environments, savagery, anti-social attitudes and boldness tend to arise. The frequent shocks to the mind make for wildness and impair the development of civilized and gentle behaviors. This is why I think those living in Europe are more courageous that those in Asia. Laziness is a product of uniform climate. Endurance of both the body and soul comes from change. Also, cowardice increases softness and laziness, while courage engenders endurance and work ethic. For this reason, those dwelling in Europe are more effective fighters. The laws of a people are also a factor since, unlike Asians, Europeans don’t have kings. Wherever there are kings, by necessity there is mass cowardice. I have said this before. It is because the souls are enslaved and refuse to encounter dangers on behalf of another’s power and they willingly withdrawal. Autonomous men—those who encounter dangers for their own benefit—are ready and willing to enter the fray and they themselves, not a master, enjoy the rewards of victory. Thus, laws are not insignificant for engendering courage. (AWP 23)

Here is Aristotle (4th cent BCE):

Concerning the citizen population, we stated earlier what the maximum number should be. Now, let’s discuss the innate characters of that population. One could potentially learn this from observing the most famous cities among the Greeks and how the rest of the inhabited world is divided up among the various peoples. The peoples living in cold climates and Europe are full of courage but lack intelligence and skill. The result is a state of continual freedom but a lack of political organization and ability to rule over others. The peoples of Asia, however, are intelligent and skilled, but cowardly. Thus, they are in a perpetual state of subjection and enslavement. The races of the Greeks are geographically in between Asia and Europe. They also are “in between” character-wise sharing attributes of both—they are intelligent and courageous. The result is a continually free people, the best political system, and the ability to rule over others (if they happen to unify under a single constitution). Aristotle Politics 1327b

And, finally, Vitruvius (1st cent CE–though not the last version from antiquity):

Regarding the need for bravery, the people in Italy are the most balanced in both their physical build and their strength of mind. For just as the planet Jupiter is tempered due to running its course between the extreme heat of Mars and the extreme cold of Saturn, in the same manner, Italy, located between north and south and thereby balanced by a mixture of both, garners unmatched praise. By its policies, it holds in check the courageousness of the barbarians [northerners] and by its strong hand, thwarts the cleverness of the southerners. Just so, the divine mind has allocated to the Roman state an eminent and temperate region so that they might become masters of the world. (Vitruvius de arch. 6.11)

We have a sorting of the world and explanations for human difference–physical and character-wise–with a bit of chauvinism thrown into the mix, but there are no institutions or mechanisms for segregating, discriminating, etc using this theory as a basis. The same theory is functional contemporaneously in ancient China and it might be closer to racialization in those texts than what we see in the Greek and Roman since the geographic and topographic associations for ‘barbarians’ in Chinese texts are used to rank peoples into hierarchies and lead to different forms of treatment (see Yang in Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds 2015).

There is one particular version of environmental determinism among the ancient Greeks and Romans that I do think rises to the level of racialization and should be discussed in terms of race–the Athenian metic system.

Here is a list of the restrictions the Athenians placed on metics, often translated as either ‘resident foreigner’ or ‘immigrant’ but also included freed slaves and the descendants of immigrants and freed slaves: Metics paid a special tax, the metoikion (12 drachma per man/family, 6 drachma for independent metic woman and children), they could not own land or house without special exemption, and there were special laws that defined their status and policed it: the graphê aprostasiou (failure to register and pay the metic tax) and the graphê xenias (pretending to be a citizen). These laws were policed heavily in the 4th century especially, when it seems that citizens who turned in violators would get a bounty for it–half the price of the sale of the person into slavery (the penalty for violating these laws) if convicted.

Of course, the most well-known of the metic laws was the Citizenship Law of 451 BCE, supposedly crafted by Perikles. According to this law, no child of a female metic with a citizen man could be citizen (whereas they could have been prior to the law). This double-descent law was, as far as we know, the first of its kind since it required the woman as well as the man to be citizens. The law was accompanied by a rise in rhetoric and public representation of autochthony, the ancient idea of indigeneity, which the Athenian, somewhat uniquely among the Greeks, promoted as their origin.

While most other Greek poleis had migration stories as their foundations, the Athenians suggested they were ‘born of the soil’. The Citizenship law, with its emphasis on purity of birth to preserve this autochthonous descent is our earliest ‘blood and soil’ ideology.  Further, we see accompanying this praise of Athenian purity a language of disease and infection attached to metics–whether it is Phaedra in Euripides’ play Hippolytus or in the law courts, this language of infection and purity was used to segregate all non-Athenians into this category of ‘metic’ that embodied institutional oppressions, dehumanization, and systemic abuses based on the supposed supremacy of Athenians over all others–Greek or non-Greeks [1]. This was a racialized system and much closer to Sheth’s definition of ‘race’ above.

ETHNICITY

I’ll start this section with an anecdote: I was at a bar one night with a colleague in religion and her partner, who was visiting from Canada. We were talking about race and ethnicity in antiquity (they do ancient Mediterranean religions). The partner of my colleague objected to the use of ‘race’ for discussing antiquity. Fine. Lots of people say this. But it was his reason that I remember:

“Race is political, ethnicity is academic.”

Oh, so incorrect, my friend. So incorrect!

Ethnicity is a 20th century term that seems to first appear in Weber’s works (around 1906). Weber’s coinage includes the caveat that ethnicity should refer to customs and  biology should not be considered a foundation for group identity unless that was somehow a shared characteristic of the group–there are ample biologically or kin based peoples who did not consider themselves of the same group–customs should be the common denominator.

As Jonathan Hall discusses in the introduction to Ethnic Identity in Ancient Greece, the term ‘ethnicity’ was taken up as a replacement for ‘race’ by many scholars based on recommendations found in the UNESCO 1950 Statement on Race. It wasn’t necessarily intended that scholars maintain the work of preserving racism under the guise of ethnicity studies, but this is what happened in some cases (and is happening again with the new genomics; See the work of Kim Tallbear, Dorothy Roberts, and Ann Morning for discussions). Omi and Wyant comment in their most recent edition of Racial Formation (2015, x)  as follows:

“In many ways the post-World War II social sciences disciplines still reproduce white supremacist assumptions…In prevailing social science research, race was conceptualized and operationalized in a fixed and static manner that failed to recognize the changing meaning of race over historical time and in varied social settings.”

Meaning, as Dorothy Kim (in a forthcoming essay) summarizes from Omi and Wyant in discussing race in medieval studies:

“In this way, using the term “ethnicity” when what is being discussed is race, structural racism, and racialization, is to uphold a white supremacist political and neoconservative position that is itself being discussed as racist frame (i.e. colorblind). Therefore, recent ambiguity, or the eschewing of the term “race” in medieval critical discussions for “ethnicity,” ignore not only the history of the social sciences in Western academic discourse of over a century, but also either because of willfulness or ignorance, gloss over the political stance the use of the term engenders.”

The decision to take up the term ethnicity was EXPLICITLY political and many fields, anthropology in particular, have come to understand that this decision had serious consequences in that it allowed racism to continue to sit below the surface and blossom uninterrogated.

If we recognize that ethnicity was a term developed in the 20th century and was, essentially, taken up as a substitute for ‘race’ after 1950, and that many scholars have done so as a way (intentionally or not) to avoid the unpleasantness of addressing contemporary race issues, should we actually just talk about ‘race’ and not ‘ethnicity’ as a more authentic and less ‘political’ and ‘colorblind’ concept?

This is, in fact, was Denise McCoskey’s decision in her book Race: Antiquity and its Legacy as a way to try to force the issue. BUT race and ethnicity are not actually interchangeable. If race means talking about systems of oppression based on variously constructed packages of human difference in different contexts, then we still need a word to talk about the cultures and societies of various peoples in particular geographic contexts in antiquity. Especially when those groups are structured around descent (real or imaginary, as Jonathan Hall articulates it).

This is what makes that Old Herodotus passage (8.144) so appealing for those of us who want to talk about ethnicity in antiquity!

Athenians: “It was quite natural for the Spartans to fear we would come to an agreement with the barbarian. Nevertheless, we think it disgraceful that you became so frightened, since you are well aware of the Athenians’ disposition, namely, that there is no amount of gold anywhere on earth so great, nor any country that surpasses others so much in beauty and fertility, that we would accept it as a reward for medizing and enslaving Hellas. [2] It would not be fitting for the Athenians to prove traitors to the Greeks with whom we are united in sharing the same kinship and language, together with whom we have established shrines and conduct sacrifices to the gods, and with whom we also share the same mode of life.”

Here is what I had to say about this passage from the entry on “Ethnicity” in the Herodotus Encyclopedia (forthcoming; edited by Christopher Baron with Wiley-Blackwell)–see this previous post for my frustration with Herodotus on this front:

“Herodotus’ network, therefore, seems to embrace linguistic, cultural, political, and descent elements. At Hdt. 8.144.2-3, his Athenians express their relationship to their fellow Greeks as rooted in shared descent (homaimos), language, religious practice, and cultural ethos. Thomas (2000) sees this list of characteristics defining ‘Greekness’ (and thus ethnicity) as ambiguous and unreflective of the reality embedded within the Histories themselves of any shared sense of Greek ethnicity. Munson (2014) emphasizes the privileging of custom given the shared kinship evident throughout the Histories of distinctive groups. If we view these elements as part of a network, however, we need not view the absence or elevation of any of single element at a given moment as defining an absolute Herodotean concept of ethnicity.”

and

“The list Herodotus’ Athenians provides us, then, at 8.144 in this key moment in his histories of what group identities entail may be the most explicit definition of ethnicity, but a specifically Athenian one as there are numerous stories throughout the text that express variations on what constitutes group identity and how these identities are formed and maintained. Herodotus’ history offers various ways to construct identities that recognize differences between ethnic groups even as they share some commonalities–ethnicity as contingent identity shaped according to changing needs and contexts (Hall 1997; Demetriou 2012). Herodotus also allows for the multiplicity of identities that any group or individual has–ones ethnic identity could include an ethnos, a genos, a phylla, and a polis depending on the circumstance and need. Ethnicity for Herodotus, as for modern scholars, “is a concept with blurred edges” (Wittgenstein §71).”

A recent discussion of ethnicity in antiquity is Erich Gruen’s 2013 article “Did Ancient Identity Depend on Ethnicity? A Preliminary Probe” (Phoenix 67: 1-22). There he attempts to argue that the ancient world did not really have any concept of ethnicity as we understand it. It is an interesting take, mostly because Gruen rejects decades of scholarship on ethnicity and even the originating definition of ethnicity by its coiner, Weber, to define ethnicity exclusively as shared lineage—the one thing Weber said when he coined the term was NOT necessary unless it was integral to the cultural character and self-definition of the people. Gruen goes on to say that ethnicity is, for him the equivalent of ‘race’. Of course, defining ‘race’ as ‘shared descent’ is itself a problem, i.e. as my undergraduate students pointed out last years when I asked to read the article, “Gruen doesn’t know what race is” and, as his bibliography shows, he doesn’t seem interested in learning.

Most other scholarship understands ethnicity closer to its roots and closer to the definition Herodotus has his Athenians provide—as a people linked through shared customs who may or may not share descent (real or imaginary). And ethnicity is, as a result, mutable and flexible. This makes ethnicity a concept with clear relevance and use value for the study of antiquity, as it allows us to look both at peoples as they self-defined and as they defined others through customs and helps us make sense of the hundreds of texts and images from antiquity (from the Mediterranean to Egypt and China and India) that describe and discuss the practices of those they considered ‘other’. There has been a tendency in recent history to conflate ethnicity with the nation-state, but this is a mis-approximation and one that has failed both for antiquity and the modern world.

Ethnicity gives us a language and structure to think about the facts of human self-grouping and sorting and the recognition of others doing the same thing. We should not throw the term out despite its political origins, but we should not pretend it can serve to cover the territory that ‘race’ is needed to do either–i.e. institutionalized segregations for the sake of oppression based on moving signifiers of what counts as ‘difference’. My suggestion is that we keep both and recognize that as with any terms we use to translate the ancient world, there will never be exact equivalences. We just need to be clear to define our terms.

The question remains–is there ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in antiquity? Can we use these terms to talk about identity formation by ancient peoples? What do we benefit or lose?

We need to acknowledge that for many in the ancient world, there may have been multiple functioning ethnicities or other identities–sometimes they were Greeks, sometimes Athenians, sometimes Ionians–and that this could change–just as Athenians had been, according to Herodotus, Pelasgians, until they changed to being Hellenes. Or how many people living within the Hellenized post-Alexander world or Roman empire could be functionally Persian, Greek, and Roman (for examples) at the same time.

We can’t ever assume that because a language doesn’t have a term for a concept that their aren’t places where that concept is functional. What we now call ‘race’ in common practice (i.e. in our census), is not what ‘race’ actually is in practice–it is a manifestation of a process that seems to occur transhistorically and transculturally as a way for dealing with the anxieties and fears that seem to accompany encounters with difference. We should expect to find ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’–our current terms for this process–in other places and times and in trying to understand how it functions in antiquity, we can, hopefully, understand better how it impacts us now.

We are long past a time (centuries, in fact) when we can pretend that any choice we make in these debates is not political. Our best hope is to try to be as accurate as we can and use carefully defined language that does the least injustice to those who have lived under the weight of prejudice and racist hate in the modern world while also trying to build the most accurate view of the ancient past.

[1] I’ve written about this in my book Immigrant Women in Athens and Susan Lape lays out some of the dynamics as well in her 2010 book Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy. You can also read some previous discussions of this system here and here at Eidolon with links to ancient sources, etc.

By Rebecca Kennedy at April 08, 2019

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Blog: Women in Classics: A Conversation with SCS President-Elect Shelley Haley: Part I

Blog: Women in Classics: A Conversation with SCS President-Elect Shelley Haley: Part I

By Claire Catenaccio | Jan 9, 2020

Our second interview in the Women in Classics series is with Shelley Haley, Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College. She was born in upstate New York and earned her B.A. from Syracuse University in 1972. She received her M.A. in 1975 and her Ph.D. in 1977, both from the University of Michigan. An expert on the figure of Cleopatra, Dr. Haley has discussed the subject on both the BBC and the Learning Channel. Her publications include Fanny Jackson Coppin’s Reminiscences of School Life, and Hints on Teaching (1995) and numerous articles on the role of women in the ancient world and on race in the discipline of Classics.

Haley previously taught at Howard University, and was a distinguished visiting scholar at Washington University-St. Louis. She has lectured widely on increasing the representation of students of color in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Classics classrooms, as well as on her research about the role of a classical education in the lives and careers of 19th-century college-educated black women. In 2017 she received an award for excellence in teaching at the collegiate level from the Society of Classical Studies. She will serve as the President of the Society for Classical Studies in 2021.

Figure 1: Shelley Haley as a graduate student in the 1970’s.
Image used by permission of Professor Haley.

CC: How did you come to Classics?

SH: I’m an accidental Classicist. I was raised by my grandmother, my father’s mother. My own mother died when I was quite young. My grandmother drummed into us four kids that we would finish school and get our education. What she had wanted more than anything else for herself was to be an elementary school teacher, but because she was a black woman living in upstate New York, she had to leave school in order to support her family. Leaving school was the one thing she always regretted. She wanted us to stay in school, especially me, because I was the oldest girl. She used to say to me, “Shemdem,” which is what she called me, “Shemdem, you’re going to be a teacher. You’re going to be the teacher I couldn’t be.” I had that in my head from the time I was very young, even before my mother died.

I went to high school in Bath, New York. I fully intended to do what was called the Regents Track, which led to college. In those days, you had to have a Regents diploma from New York State in order to go to any college, whether state or private. My father had gone to Syracuse University during the Great Depression. Imagine that! When I tell this story to my students, I always impress upon them, “I want you to think about what it meant for a black man to go to college during the Depression, and the sacrifices that his family had to make in order to make that happen.” He was a football player, which helped, but the scholarships they had back then weren’t like what they have today. But anyway, my father had gone to Syracuse University. So I had my grandmother on one side saying, “You will finish school. You will finish school.” And I had my father on the other side saying, “One of you four is going to go to Syracuse.” And I thought, “It’s going to be me.”

CC: Tell me about your experience in high school.

SH: I remember the first day of pre-orientation for high school. I went with my father to the guidance counselor to set up my program for the coming year. And the guidance counselor took a look at my name and said, “Oh, you’re Ethel’s granddaughter!” You know, it was small town! He said, “Your grandmother is a fabulous cook. Just fabulous!” And then he said, “We’re going to put you in the Home Ec Track. You’ll be a great cook just like your grandmother.” I was very shy, so I didn’t say anything. In fact, when I was a child I stammered, so I tended to stay quiet. Luckily, my father was there. He spoke right up, and he said, “No, you don’t understand. She’s going into the Regents Track. She’s headed to college.” He explained gently and firmly to the guidance counselor that we were not interested in Home Economics.  The guidance counselor was a white man, and he was very discouraging, and very skeptical. In the end, he caved. Then he started telling me all of the requirements for college. He said I had to take four years of math, and four years of English, and four years of History, and four years of science. All of that was fine by me. But then he said, “You also have to take four year of a foreign language.” And I was devastated. I felt, because of my stammer, that I just couldn’t do it. I knew I couldn’t keep up in French or Spanish in the classroom. But the guidance counselor suggested Latin, and that’s what I took!

CC: What was your high school Latin class like?

SH: I had a fabulous teacher, Mrs. June LeRay. On the first day, we got our books, sat down, the whole routine. Mrs. LeRay said, “All right! Everyone, turn to page 1.” Then she said, “Shelley, stand up and read the first sentence.” And I just burst into tears. Everyone was looking at me. The teacher came over, took me by the hand, and led me outside the classroom. She said, “Young lady, what are these tears for?” I said, “I can’t do this. I can’t, I can’t. I can’t do this.” Then Mrs. LeRay took me by the shoulders and said, “I never want to hear those words come out of your mouth again. You can, and you will. Go back in there, stand by your desk, and read the first sentence.” And I did! The first sentence was “Britannia est insula.” It was a liberating moment for me, to have someone believe in me, someone who didn’t know me at all. For Mrs. LeRay, I was just another student in her class.

People often ask me, “Why did you stick with Latin?” Honestly, in high school, Latin was the only course where I didn’t get into fights with the teacher. Here’s an example. I was in ninth grade, in my Social Studies class. The teacher was explaining what we were going to be doing during the year. She says, “We’re going to learn about the great civilizations of Greece and Rome and France and Italy.” And then, gratuitously, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, she said, “We won’t be learning about Asia or Africa, because those places contributed nothing to human civilization.” Well, shy as I was, I raised my hand and I said, “I read in the encyclopedia that the Chinese invented gunpowder.” She told me I was being impertinent and sent me to the principal’s office. I didn’t know what “impertinent” meant, but the way she spit it out at me, I figured it wasn’t good. So, I went to the principal. He was all right. He asked me to tell him what happened, and then he heaved a deep sigh. I think after that he and my father had a talk, and then the principal talked to the Social Studies teacher. For the rest of the year, she didn’t call on me anymore. She just acted like I wasn’t in the room.

A similar incident happened when I was taking American History. Back then – I’m really going to date myself here – it was only a few years since Hawaii and Alaska had become the 49th and 50th states. We were talking in class about how territories become states. The teacher said, “Puerto Rico will never become a state, because it’s not of Anglo-Saxon background.” I raised my hand and I said, “But Hawaii became a state, and it’s not of Anglo-Saxon background.” He glanced at me sharply, and he said, “Who told you that?” I said, “No one told me. Just look at the people who live in Hawaii.” Back to the principal’s office! That principal and I got to be fairly good friends.

Amidst all this, Latin was sort of a haven for me. We would parse and we would construe, and I didn’t have to worry about arguing over stuff. Now I know that there is plenty to argue about with Latin, but that came with learning more.

Figure 2: Shelley Haley at the AIA-SCS Annual Conference 2019 in San Diego.
Image via Wikimedia under a CC-BY-SA 4.0.

CC:  What happened when it came time for you to apply to college?

SH: In those days, it was a very different system. It wasn’t as high-powered as it is now. I had some letters of recommendation, and I took some achievement tests. Mrs. LeRay was proud because I got a perfect score on my Latin achievement test. But she never pushed me to be a Latin teacher. Besides, I had my grandmother to please, and I knew I was going to be an elementary school teacher. It didn’t even occur to me that I could teach Latin. It was something I enjoyed doing, and that was it.

When I got into Syracuse, I was really excited. I went to my father to show him the letter. He read the letter, and then he said, “Why do you want to go to college?” I was totally confused. I said, “You always said you wanted one of us to follow you to Syracuse.” He said, “Yeah, but I thought it’d be one of the boys.” I said, “What difference does that make?” He said, “You’re not going to use this. You’re going to stay here and you’re going to take care of me.” That’s how it was in my family. I am the eldest daughter. I was supposed to be the caretaker of my parents.

CC: What’s the story of your father’s family?

SH: We have been able to trace the family records back before 1823. We found the gravestone of the first Haley, as far as we can tell, who was enslaved in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. He was a barber, and his master would hire him out for his services. The two of them came to an understanding that he could keep a portion of the money that he made as a barber, and my ancestor saved that money and he bought his freedom. He came north to Steuben County and bought a plot of land and built a barbershop. He died in 1823. There’s no birthdate on the gravestone because I don’t think he knew when he was born. Since then his children and his children’s children had lived in upstate New York, and they were all barbers. My father was determined not to be a barber. His father was a barber, and his uncle was a barber, and they owned a barbershop in Bath, New York. My father was very good at cutting hair, and he used to cut my brothers’ hair, but he didn’t want to be a barber. What he really wanted to be, in the terminology of the time, was “the great Negro novelist.” It didn’t happen, sadly. He was a sports journalist, and he worked in Chicago. That’s where he met my mother, who was working for the black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. He was the sports journalist for that paper. Then my parents lived in D.C. for a while. Even before my mother’s death, my father bounced around a lot. He was frustrated, and he drank too much, and he could never really keep a steady job. I learned all this as an adult. As a child, I didn’t know much.

Figure 3: Linotype operators of The Chicago Defender, Chicago, IL. Image in the Public Domain via the Library of Congress.

CC: But you did go to college in the end?

SH: I did. I went to Syracuse in 1968.

CC: What was your experience like in college?

SH: It was a racially diverse environment, which was new to me. I came from a very small town, which was mostly white. I was often the only child of color in my class. Often the only other children of color in the school were my siblings. I was very comfortable being around white people.

Of course, I had experienced racism. When I was nine, before my mother died, we moved from Philadelphia to Hampton Institute University in Virginia, a historically black college. The town of Hampton was still segregated. I think my parents handled this very badly. They should have sat us down and said, “Look, we’re moving to a place that’s very different to what you are used to. Here you must follow our instructions completely.” Instead, they told us nothing. And as a child, I gloried in disobeying my parents. Oh, I got such a thrill! If they said, “Don’t do X!” I would do X. Actually, I think, that is why I’ve been successful in Classics, because of my rebellious attitude.

But, back to Hampton. We lived on campus, because my father was Director of Public Relations, which made me an “admin brat.” That’s what I was called. There were faculty brats and there were admin brats. My parents told us, after we moved in, that we couldn’t go to Woolworth. Woolworth was a five-and-dime chain store which used to have soda fountains. There had been a Woolworth back in Bath, and we kids used to get on our bikes and ride and go get a milkshake, and then ride home. But here in Hampton my parents said we couldn’t go to Woolworth without one of them to accompany us. Well, you say that to Shelley, what is she going to do? She’s going to go to Woolworth. I don’t think I did it right away. It took a while. I remember how weird it felt to me to be in a social context where there were no white people. Among the children at Hampton, there was a real social hierarchy, based on skin color and based on the job your parents had. It was worse for me, because I was coming from the North, and I didn’t sound like everyone else. I was kind of shunned by the other kids. They thought I thought I was better than them, because I was from the North. It was not a happy experience.

One day, I was just feeling particularly lonely and in need of comfort food. I thought, “I’ll get on my bike and I’ll go to Woolworth and I’ll get a milkshake.” My mother was nowhere around. And my grandmother wasn’t living with us at that point. So I get on my bike. I don’t talk to anybody. I don’t tell anybody. I get on my bike, and I start pedaling. Now, my mother didn’t know how to drive. And anyway, my father had the car. And my mother at that point was severely overweight, so if she ran, I’m surprised she didn’t have a heart attack. I cannot tell you from that day to this how she did it, but as I pedaled up to Woolworth, I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt, pull me off the bike, whirl me around and – it was my mother – and slap me across the face. She said, “Now you get on that bike and you go home!” For years I felt angry and frustrated that she did that to me. She never told me what I did wrong, except that I disobeyed her. I didn’t learn until many years later that she was trying to protect me from the segregation at Woolworth. Because if I had walked in that front door, which I was going to do, and sat down at that counter…

CC: She was protecting you.

SH: She was. But I was talking about Syracuse. At the time when I was an undergraduate, the campus was very contentious, because of the protest against the Vietnam War and because of the rise of black nationalism and the Black Panthers. Students for a Democratic Society actually started at Syracuse. All of these different ideas were totally new to me. I remember feeling that same sense of isolation from the black students at Syracuse as I had back in Hampton. I felt more comfortable sitting with the friends I had made who happened to be white, and not at the “black table.” Because of this, the black kids decided I didn’t want to be black. But those just weren’t categories in my head.

Figure 4:  Cover of SDS introductory pamphlet circa 1966.
Image via Wikimedia under a CC-BY-SA 4.0.

When I was a sophomore, I transferred into the School of Education. After I transferred, I thought, “Oh dear God. What have I done?” The classes were mind-numbing, just absolutely boring to me. I couldn’t stand it. I lasted two weeks. So, I went back to my pre-major adviser, who was ethnically German, and he taught German. Professor Jager was his name. I went back to him and I said, “What am I going to do?” You have to understand that my whole life, I had thought I was going to be an elementary school teacher. I was absolutely devastated by how much I hated the School of Ed. But Professor Jager nodded, and he said, “Ja, ja, I knew you would be back.” He suggested, “Major in German.” Obviously, I couldn’t do that! But then he started looking over my records and he says, “Well, what have you taken that you enjoyed taking?” And I said, “Well, I really like Latin. In fact, I just started Greek because I like Latin so much.” So he said, “Well, major in Latin.” So that’s what I did. I started taking lots of Latin, as well as Greek. I studied abroad, in Florence. I took an art history course and I took a course on the history of opera, which still sticks with me.

There was a very small group of black students at Syracuse, and we all knew each other. When it got around that I was going to major in Latin, it was a big deal. I remember one young woman, the most fiercely intellectual of the group, who just intimidated me totally with her intellect and presence. She came up to me at the lunch table and she goes, “What the hell you think you’re doing, Latin?” And I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Latin? What are you going to do for black people with Latin?” She thought I was a traitor. I said, “Well, you know, I think we need black people who are successful at a lot of different things.” And she said, “You need to be out there. You need to be visible. Latin is invisible.” Oh, she was so mad. She was just so mad. She thought I was a total sellout.

The second part of the Women in Classics interview with Shelley Haley will be published Monday morning, January 13, 2020. It will address her experiences in graduate school and within academia.

Header Image: An alleged posthumous painted portrait of Cleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt from Roman Herculaneum, 1st century CE. From Wikimedia (Image in the Public Domain via Wikimedia).

Claire Catenaccio is a scholar of ancient drama and its modern reception. She is currently writing her first book, which explores monody, or solo actor’s song, in the plays of Euripides. She has published on the imagery of dreams in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, on singing heroes in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, and on the transformation of the myth of Orpheus in the Broadway musical Hadestown. As a dramaturg and director, she has worked extensively with modern stagings of ancient texts. She teaches as a member of the faculty at Georgetown University.

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Blog: Women in Classics: A Conversation with Shelley Haley: Part II

Blog: Women in Classics: A Conversation with Shelley Haley: Part II

By Claire Catenaccio | Jan 13, 2020

Our second interview in the Women in Classics series is with Shelley Haley, Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College. This is the second of a two-part interview with Prof. Haley, which picks up at the point when she decided to apply to graduate school to study Classics.

CC: How did you decide to apply to graduate school?

This was a very turbulent time in American history. I was fed up with the United States of America, absolutely fed up. I remember the conversations we used to have about the women’s movement. This was back in the dark ages. There were three or four white women on my floor in college having a deep discussion, wringing their hands and saying, “But how, how, how are we going to have a family and a career? How?” In my head I was just frustrated. My mother, my grandmother, her mother before her, all of them always had to work, and always had family. It can be done. I think that was my first introduction to black feminism, and to the line that divides it from white feminism. I had had enough.

When I decided to apply to graduate school, I didn’t want to go anywhere in the United States. I only applied to Canadian universities. I applied to McMaster and to McGill. I got into both. As a senior I was in the process of getting landed immigrant status, so that I could get funding in Canada. Then one of my professors, Dr. Mills, came up to me and said, “This fellowship came across my desk, and I think you’re perfect for it. I think you should apply for it.” It was called the Danforth Fellowship. It paid for four years of graduate school, which was wonderful, but the catch was that it was only for institutions in the United States. I applied, in a halfhearted way. And lo and behold, I was a finalist.

The Danforth selection committee set up an interview Rochester, New York. Two days before the interview, I came down with a wicked case of the flu. I was so sick. I was too sick to fly from Syracuse to Rochester. Dr. Mills, the wonderful man who had encouraged me to apply, drove me all the way to Rochester. He waited while I did the four-hour interview, and then he drove me back.

CC: How did the interview go?

I thought I did lousy, because I was so sick. But I got the fellowship! One of the people who interviewed me was none other than the famous professor Helen North. Years later, she told me, “You were the most impressive person that we interviewed.” That was very nice to hear. I remember I had written an essay for that application in the form of a dramatic dialogue between Homer and Virgil, in which Virgil defended himself against the claims of plagiarism. Helen North said to me, “Really, you should print that up and publish that.”

CC: How did you choose a graduate school?

I applied to a number of schools, because the deadlines were already past for most American graduate programs. I ended up going to the University of Michigan. At that time, back in 1972, Michigan was called “The Harvard of the Midwest.” It was very conservative. All the professors called each other “Mister.” The only female professor when I entered was Gerda Seligson. She was my lifeline. She was a Jewish woman from Germany, who had escaped the Nazis and gone to England. Boy, it’s too bad you can’t interview her, because she had one hell of a life! At one point, she had to work on a potato farm because no one would hire her to do anything else. Not because she was Jewish, but because she was German! There was real distrust of Germans in America after the war. Anyway, she was just an amazing woman. She didn’t take any nonsense.

Figure 1: Cover of Gerda Seligson’s Greek for Reading (Unviersity of Michigan Press, 1994).

CC: What were you interested in working on at the time?

I had no idea! I liked Latin, and I liked prose. But like I said at the beginning, I’m an accidental Classicist. I was intrigued by D.C. Earl’s “The Political Vocabulary of the Roman Republic.” For my dissertation, I wrote about the role of amicitia in the life of Pompey. But I have not looked at it since I defended it, not once.

I had a difficult time in graduate school in some ways. I remember taking a class on Herodotus. I was not the only woman in the class, but I certainly was the only student of color. The professor determined your participation grade by a tally of the number of times that he called on you. And this man never called on me. I would raise my hand. I was always prepared. But he never called on me. He just looked right through me, the whole semester. When I got my grade, it was bad. I went to his office and I said, “I don’t understand this grade. I did really well on the exams. I never missed a class.” And he said, “You didn’t participate as fully as some of the other students.” He wanted to laugh it off. But I was mad, because the whole thing was biased to start with, since the grade was based on the professor calling on people. He did not like that. People don’t like it when you use the word “biased.” “Litigate,” “biased,” “racist,” don’t use those words! He said, “Well, I think we need to bring the Chair in about this if that’s your attitude.” I said, “Go ahead! I’m not afraid of him. Go ahead! Bring him in. I want to hear how you defend yourself. I’ve got witnesses. You never called on me.” He ended up changing the grade, but not enough. Unfortunately, that kind of soured me on taking Greek at Michigan.

CC: Tell me about your first job.

When I got my degree, in 1977, it was a bad time for jobs. There was an oil embargo, there was the whole Watergate scandal. Not much was available. And Michigan had a hierarchy, designed to support white men coming up through the ranks. It was subtle. But if you were a woman, the professors wouldn’t push for you in the same way.

But I did get a job, as a leave replacement at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. I worked there from 1977 to 1978. The funny thing about it was that was within two weeks of getting my PhD, I found out I was pregnant. I already had the job at Luther. I wrote to them and said, “A little wrinkle, but this isn’t going to stop me. I just wanted you to be aware.” And they said, “That’s fine. We’ll work something out.” This was before maternal leave. I was naïve, and it was much harder than I thought it was going to be to have a baby and return to teaching. But the job at Luther was a transformational experience, because it was my first exposure to a small liberal arts college. I enjoyed it a lot.

While I was at Luther, I got recruited by Howard University in Washington, D.C. The Dean actually came out to Iowa and offered me the job, before it was even advertised. He said, “You’re a black woman with a PhD in Classics. We want you at Howard.” I was flattered. I said yes. I worked at Howard from 1979 to 1985.

CC: What was it like to work at Howard University?

It was very triggering because it reminded me of my childhood experience at Hampton. It was that same kind of colorist mentality. Everybody liked me because I was married to a white man, which was weird. Classics also occupied a very odd position in the university. Howard is a historically black university, but the Classics department is an oasis of whiteness. The students are of color, but most the professors are white. At time when I was hired, another black woman was also recruited to join the department. Her name was Carrie Cowherd. She had already been denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. She was older than I was, but they also hired her as an Assistant Professor. The great Frank Snowden had retired, but he still taught in the department and was still very much a force there. We called him “Zeus,” because he could thunder!

Figure 2: Cover of Frank Snowden’s Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks
(Harvard University Press, 1983).

CC:  But you felt uncomfortable there?

I did. I felt a lot of cognitive dissonance. In a black environment with storied traditions and history, no one pushed against the whiteness of Classics. I was teaching a course of women in the ancient world and I said something about Cleopatra as an African ruler. A couple of days later, Frank Snowden caught me walking down the hall and he said, “Did you say Cleopatra was black?” And I said, “No, I didn’t say that.” Because I didn’t. I didn’t say that. I told him that I said she was an African ruler. He said, “That’s not true.” But I disagreed.

CC:  When did you become interested in the issue of race in antiquity?

While I was at Howard. It started with Cleopatra. She haunted me. I had a dream where Cleopatra came to me and said, “Why aren’t you telling my story?” When I woke up, I answered her in my head, “There’s nothing to tell! What is there to say except what’s already been said?”

At Howard I taught a course on women in antiquity. We were talking about Cleopatra, and I explained that she was a Greek ruler by genealogy. I had checked out the Cambridge Ancient History and brought it to class, and I showed my students the genealogy that’s printed in the back of the book. One student, whose name was Roy, pointed to the question mark by Cleopatra’s grandmother in the genealogy. He asked me, “What does this mean?” I said, “That just means they don’t know her name.” But he pointed below the question mark, where they had put in parentheses “Egyptian concubine.” And Roy asked me, “What about that?” Honestly, until that student put his finger there, I had never seen it. That just goes to show how manipulative a master narrative can be. I never saw until that moment that even the Cambridge Ancient History can leave room for interpretation, can leave open a space for you to imagine the life of that Egyptian concubine who became the grandmother of Cleopatra.

In the early 1990’s, I had a serious midlife crisis. I think it was brought on by feeling rejected by my black students at Hamilton. I was not invited to celebrations. I was not asked to sit on panels about what it was like to be a black professor. I was not asked to teach in the summer bridge program for incoming students of color. All of these slights made me question myself. I thought, “Maybe I’m really not helping students of color. Maybe I’m not being an asset to them. Maybe I need to get out of this.” I tried other things. I taught Women’s Studies, I taught Africana Studies. But there was still something missing. I had a lot of long conversations about it with my husband, and I just knew that I couldn’t be the first person of African descent to have these doubts about the field. I started researching African American men who had studied Classics. The 19th century is full of them. I got very excited. I went around the country, lecturing about this one and that one. And then I had a further revelation and started doing research on women of African descent who had studied Classics. I learned about Fanny Jackson Coppin, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Terrell. These women went through the same thing I did. They had white men telling them they couldn’t do this, and white women telling them they couldn’t do this, and then they themselves questioned whether they could do it. But they kept going, and they did great things.

Figure 3: Portrait of Cleopatra VII, dated 40-30 BCE. Inv. No. 38511. Rome, Vatican Museums, Italy.
Image by Sergey Sosnovskiy (CC BY-SA 4.0).

CC:  How do you think the field is changing, both for people of color and for women?

I’m worried about it. In my experience, we’ve taken the old-boy network and replaced it with the old-girl network, where all the girls are white. These women do not understand intersectionality. When they think they understand it, they distort the concept so that race is always excluded. I’ve been angered by white women in Classics who co-opt progressive movements for their own benefit. I do not dismiss the pain or the injustice of what has happened to my white female colleagues, but there’s too much hypocrisy. But your question was about change, and some things have changed. I would say there’s more visibility for white women in Classics than there used to be. But more change is coming. How should I put it? Practicing Classicists of color are now reaching a critical mass, particularly in the SCS. Now you’re starting to see the pushback.

CC:  What advice would you give to your younger self?

That’s a really interesting question. One thing that I find frustrating is that people perceive me in a certain way. I’ve heard myself described as “outspoken” and “angry.”

CC:  Maybe “impertinent,” like your Social Studies teacher said?

Yes, impertinent! [laughs] But I’m not. Sometimes I am angry, yes. There’s a lot to be angry about. But I’m not going to stop speaking out. I’m not going to stop speaking my truth just because it makes people uncomfortable. I have suffered many macro- and micro-aggressions, but it’s not going to stop me.

CC:  Do you see any positive changes on the horizon?

You know, I go back and forth. I want to believe. I want to believe that you younger folks are going to take these issues of inequality by the horns. I hope you can sustain the force to change a deeply embedded issue. It’s not going to happen overnight.

** Readers may also be interested in the autobiographical material contained in Dr. Haley’s essay, “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering,” in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin, ed. Feminist Theory and the Classics (Routledge, 1993): 23-43.

Header: Statue of a Ptolemaic Queen, perhaps Cleopatra VII, 200–30 BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York. Image in the Public Domain.

Claire Catenaccio is a scholar of ancient drama and its modern reception. She is currently writing her first book, which explores monody, or solo actor’s song, in the plays of Euripides. She has published on the imagery of dreams in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, on singing heroes in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, and on the transformation of the myth of Orpheus in the Broadway musical Hadestown. As a dramaturg and director, she has worked extensively with modern stagings of ancient texts. She teaches as a member of the faculty at Georgetown University.

37

Rebecca Futo Kennedy: Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World

In June 2017, Professor Sarah Bond published an article in Hyperallergic on polychromy, the multicolored paint on ancient marble sculpture, and how its erasure has connections to white supremacy. The topic might not strike the professional scholar of the ancient world as particularly controversial or problematic; the response will (unfortunately) also not surprise scholars who have ventured recently into the public realm to discuss the problem of Classics and racism. In addition to misrepresentations in conservative media outlets, her essay generated over a hundred comments — most of them dismissive, some hostile — and a slew of threatening emails, tweets, even tumblr pages.

If one peruses the comments on the article itself, some interesting themes emerge that may explain why articles like Bond’s receive such vitriolic backlash, even from people who clearly have studied the ancient world at university and do not consider their own responses as contributing to white supremacy. It can also help to explain why I teach race and ethnicity in the Classical world and why I hope more students get a chance to study it.

Bond’s article aimed to inform the broader public on aspects of Classical antiquity that relate to race and ethnicity (to use contemporary language). Similar was Professor Mary Beard’s response to anger at the representation of some Romans with dark skin in a BBC educational cartoon on Roman Britain, for which she received copious amounts of abuse. Articles like these frequently seem to receive hostile responses, mostly attempts to dismiss the validity of studying race/ethnicity in antiquity at all. Why? In some cases, readers assert that the ancient Greeks and Romans had no concepts like our modern race (which is itself a social construct — genetic testing only confirms the categories we are looking for) and/or ethnicity. At other times, they protest that any talk of 19th century racism in the field of Classics is intended to arouse “white guilt” in those who enjoy Classics today. It seems to be the case that people are more comfortable with antiquity being racist (and sexist and classist) than they are with it being diverse.

In Bond’s case, commenters accused her both of pushing a “liberal” political agenda by inserting race into everything and of accusing white people of being racist because she pointed out the reality that the whiteness of marble sculptures was emphasized and enhanced in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a fetishization of racial whiteness and the equation of it with beauty. Her points were further misrepresented in conservative media as “Professor says White Statues are Racist.”

Reading the responses to Bond and other similar articles has made me think about the importance of teaching ancient Greek and Roman ideas about race and ethnicity. Something has gone wrong in the classroom when even those people who have taken courses on the Classical world view discussions of race and ethnicity in Classics as part of a politicized liberal agenda rather than as scholarship designed to understand the ancient world and the history of its study. Some may even argue that we should only teach and discuss with the general public aspects of the ancient world that will not offend anyone. But when that goal of inoffensive appeal runs against the goal of scholarly honesty, we do our field no favors.

Further, when members of our profession are attacked for doing their job and by sharing what is well-known fact in professional circles with the public, the responsibility rests with us all to look at how and what we teach — especially when it contributes to the continued use of the classical past to support modern white supremacy, and especially when that support is often passive or dressed up in the guise of well-meaning people who enjoy learning about ancient Greece and Rome.

Discussions of race and ethnicity in the Classical world should not be controversial, at least not among classicists. The topic has been an important area of scholarship almost since the field came into being and it has almost always been political: from the promotion of the so-called Dorian invasion, to theories that race mixing led to the fall of Rome, to the Black Athena debates of the 1980s and ’90s, to continued use of autochthony as a rallying cry. When Dr. Donna Zuckerberg wrote an article last year in this journal encouraging us to incorporate more of it into our research and teaching, I was surprised at how few people within the field came to her defense when she was maligned and received various types of threats for asking us to do something that we should already be doing as responsible scholars, particularly in light of the way classicists had intentionally reinforced theories of white superiority using ancient texts in the past.

Even the most casual reader of ancient texts will find discussion of what we today call race and ethnicity in a wide range of ancient authors — from Homer and Hesiod to Herodotus and Hippocrates, from Aeschylus to Ctesias, Caesar, Tacitus, Plutarch, Pliny, Livy, Sallust, Horace, Ovid and more. Further, any trip to a museum yields ample images that further display the Greek and Roman interest in and engagement with human diversity. And yet, we still hear the refrain that wanting to study or teach race and ethnicity is a part of a “social justice” political agenda because the ancient Greeks and Romans had no words that are exactly equivalent to our modern concepts of race or ethnicity — which is not, in fact, true.

Greeks and Romans seem to have been obsessed with what we would term race or ethnicity: they had a whole series of words (ethnos, genos, phylla, gens, natio, etc.) from which our modern terms for group organization based on descent and shared culture derive, and all of them contain elements of what we call race and ethnicity. Interestingly, one of the things that our ancient sources seem to make clear is that frequently they did not separate biological descent from cultural or “national” identity. Nor should we use ethnicity as a “safe” way to avoid talking about race in antiquity as some people try to do in the modern world. The two concepts are hardly distinctive for the ancients.

The two concepts, race and ethnicity, are both aspects of group identity for Greeks and Romans. The most famous statement that demonstrates this connection comes from Herodotus, who has his Athenians tell the Spartans that they will never betray their fellow Greeks because they share blood (homaimos is a word often used for siblings), language, religious practices, and a way of life (ethos). This passage lists what we consider today the core elements of race and ethnicity, and this is often where my courses start. The Greeks and Romans had multiple words that encompassed the idea of identity based on descent groups, geographic origin, and shared cultural practices (like language). They absolutely had concepts akin to modern race/ethnicity, even if they weren’t the specific type of cultural and “scientific” categories we have today. And, what’s more, they seemed to consider them subjective concepts, not objective. Teaching these complexities can have an impact in our classrooms.

I have been teaching race and ethnicity in the Classical world for almost a decade now, and I do so in several ways. I include discussions of relevant texts and material artifacts in my Greek and Roman history classes and try to offer students Greek and Latin courses on some of the many texts that engage with the issues of identity, such as Herodotus’ Histories, Euripides’ Medea, Sallust’s Jugurthan War, and Tacitus’ Germania (a most dangerous book!).

I also regularly teach the topic as a stand-alone course called “Ancient Identities” that has proven popular with students and colleagues alike. The course focuses on the various ways that ancient Greeks and Romans talked about, represented, and attempted to understand and categorize human diversity — what we call race and ethnicity. The modern reception of these ancient ideas constitutes the final three weeks of the course.

Antiquity provides us with quite a few approaches to how to think about the subject. The Greeks and Romans used mythical genealogies and foundation stories, considered the impact of descent and selective breeding (a type of eugenics), and how customs and languages bind peoples together. Perhaps the most prevalent theory for what made groups of peoples different was what we call environmental determinism. Each of these approaches were trying to explain both physical differences and perceived differences in the inherent character of peoples — an important component of racism today — differences supposedly shaped by birth, environment, and culture.

For example, Hippocrates, the Greek physician, tells us that Scythians (a name that designated nearly all northern European peoples in the 5th century BCE) are red, flabby, unhealthy, and filled with water because they live in a cold, wet climate (Hipp. Aer. 15). Vitruvius, the Roman architect, explains that people from hot, dry climates, such as the Ethiopians, are long-lived and healthy, dark skinned (because of sunburn), intelligent, and cowardly because they don’t have a lot of blood to spare — the heat dries it up. Germans, on the other hand, had red hair and were pale because of cold burn, dull-witted, and courageous — wet climate means more blood, which means they didn’t worry about losing it in a fight (Vit. de Arch. 6.1.). Herodotus ends his history with a story that tells us that harsh lands breed hard people and bountiful lands breed soft ones (Her. Hist. 9.122.2–3).

Environmental determinism is very widespread in our ancient sources as the ancients often considered geography and climate, coupled with descent, as the primary factors in shaping physical and cultural difference — the above examples are only three. Of course, it wasn’t the only way the ancient Greeks and Romans understood human diversity — politics (a type of cultural environment) could impact people as well. Having a single king instead of an oligarchy or democracy could make a people “slavish” instead of “free,” as Herodotus, Hippocrates, Livy, and many others tell us.

The Athenians elevated the issue of heritability and gene pool above other factors in trying to preserve their indigenous, environmentally determined character through restrictive laws on immigration and citizen purity. But the Athenians were unusual in classical antiquity in their privileging of indigenous status. Other peoples — such as the Thebans, Argives, and Romans — inscribed their histories with narratives of immigration, ethnic/racial blending, and inclusion — an interesting notion if physical environment really was thought to determine identity.

The Romans, of course, are probably the most famous “mixed” people from antiquity and told in their histories and arts that they originated from immigrants and refugees. Aeneas migrated with the last of the Trojans (Phoenicians) to Italy from Troy, and he had a child by a native Italian woman who founded another city, Alba Longa, from which eventually came Romulus and Remus. Romulus founded Rome by killing his brother and then inviting in any bandit or criminal who wanted to join him. They then kidnapped the neighboring Sabine women and married them once they realized a city couldn’t perpetuate itself without women. They also had Etruscan kings, and many of the cities they incorporated in southern Italy were Greek colonies. These myths mirrored Roman reality.

The Roman practice of incorporating non-Roman peoples as citizens — both the descendants of freed slaves and people of other ethnic groups in the provinces — over the course of most of their history also reflects a tradition of not basing Roman identity on a concept of racial or ethnic purity. You could be a Roman and be Greek, Syrian, Judean, Gallic, German, Spanish, Numidian, Nubian, Ethiopian, Egyptian, and more. While Romans wrote a lot about non-Roman peoples, what constituted a Roman per se was never defined as a single ethnic group — foreigners could become “Roman.” Places could “become” Roman, too, through engineered environments. This doesn’t mean Romans did not have prejudices, it just means those prejudices didn’t impact whether one was or was not or could become a Roman.

Someone will surely object, “You teach this class because you want to force modern ideas on the ancient past, because you hate the field of Classics, and want to discourage people from studying it!” (I received such comments in email after my last Eidolon article). That is not, in fact, my agenda. I want just the opposite. I want more students to see that the Classical world is not owned by one group of people and embrace it as interesting and useful. A narrative of a monoethnic and monochromatic Classical world is demonstrably false and, frankly, boring.

I love Classics, in part, because of its endless variety, because it both offers us a mirror for reflecting upon our own racism and because it offers us alternatives for how to think about human difference. We just need to be honest when we teach it about both the good and the bad and be critical of our sources as well as in awe of them. The debate at Reed college over the place of the Classics in their curriculum should remind us and make us conscientious of the consequences of yoking the ancient Greeks and Romans to the modern construct of “western civilization” and “whiteness.” The Classical texts and peoples themselves are not inherently “Western” or “white,” but there is a reason some people think so and we need to do better at teaching Classical antiquity in all its diversity and showing that we understand and own its racist uses — past and present.

The Reed situation raises the stakes, I think, of asking why do readers attack, threaten, and/or denigrate scholars who try to share this broader evidence and reality of the diversity of classical antiquity with the general public? Does it give fodder to those who take as an attack on white people any suggestion that the Classical past was not as “white” as modern enthusiasts of classics seem to be? Or when we acknowledge and discuss openly how Classics has been complicit in maintaining a narrative of white superiority historically in Europe and America? Or when we remind people that the category “white” is a modern invention and has itself been altered over the course of the last century to incorporate Mediterranean peoples when they had not been considered “white” before?

The reaction comes in part because the ancient world as it existed and as scholars recover it is not the world that gets represented in popular culture, in neo-Nazi and white supremacist bubbles, and, frequently, in high school and even college classrooms (our medievalist colleagues share this problem). And, clearly, there are many who would still like to see Classics remain fodder for justifying theories of modern Euro-American superiority. Otherwise, they would not get their knickers in a twist over polychromy and other evidence — visual and literary — that shows that the ancient world was filled with racial/ethnic diversity and that the ancients didn’t typically think that was a bad thing.

Pointing out the reality of where the ancient world was not racist, but pluralist and diverse seems to offend people even more than pointing out where it was racist. That resistance should be evidence enough of racism in the study of the Classical world and is reason enough for why we need to keep teaching and writing about race and ethnicity in antiquity. It doesn’t make someone who enjoys the Classics today — or who thinks the sculptures are beautiful when white — racist to admit to the sins of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different story, however, when we moderns become overly invested in a belief that ancient Greeks and Romans are the foundation of a “white,” “western” (Christian) civilization that belongs somehow to white people and white people alone. Denying the multiethnic nature of the Classical past and trying to keep it “whites only” is racist.

The ancients were fascinated with understanding human variation, what we call race and ethnicity; the sources are clear on this. By teaching the ancient evidence on it and by getting students to tackle the questions that the Classical sources raise, we can make our field more open and inclusive and also engage the public in a dialogue about the interconnectedness of ancient and modern racism, while also introducing alternative models from the multiethnic ancient Mediterranean for thinking about race today. Whether as a stand-alone class or integrated into history, literature, or language classes, engaging with issues of race and ethnicity across our Classics curricula is remarkably easy and meaningful.

The problem of white supremacy is not going away, and Classics has found itself (once again) in the fulcrum. So, if a side consequence of teaching about human diversity in the ancient world is the disruption of contemporary white supremacists in their attempts to continue a narrative of superiority based on their misappropriation of the Classical past, I’ll take it.

Rebecca Futo Kennedy is a classicist and ancient historian who enjoys a nice glass of wine and a hammock whenever possible. She writes and teaches about law, politics, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and women in ancient Greece and Rome. She also has a blog, Classics at the Intersections, which includes a continually expanding bibliography of scholarship on race and ethnicity in the classical world.

“Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World”

Rebecca Futo Kennedy

https://eidolon.pub/why-i-teach-about-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-classical-world-ade379722170

VIII

Roman Satire, Contemporary Comedy, and Lesbian Content

38

Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette"

Let’s use this page to comment via hypothes.is on Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette.”

39

Hannah Gadsby "Douglas"

We can use this page to make comments via hypthes.is on Gadsby’s show “Douglas.”

IX

Student Projects

This part of the pressbook contains the final projects of the community of scholars in Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome, fall 2020.  Created during a time of heightened stress and without the supports available on-campus and in-person, these projects demonstrate the resilience and dedication of all involved.

40

The Penis Poetry (Among Other Things)

Masturbation in the Roman Empire by Paige Blackwell

Whether it be written on the walls in the city of Pompeii or inscribed in the poetry of some of the most famous Roman poets, one thing is very obvious: the Romans masturbated.  While there is very little serious literature on the subject in Ancient Rome, they made it incredibly obvious that everyone was doing it. Masturbation has a tricky history in Ancient Rome and was seen as an act for slaves. The Romans did not see it as something that the wealthy elites were to participate in, as they did activities that are far more problematic by today’s standards. It was often the point of ridicule and joke. Much like the people of the modern world, the Romans loved a good dick joke above all else. Sexual humor was at the center of Roman culture. Puns and jokes about masturbation are scattered all throughout Roman art, literature, theatre, and even inscribed on the walls of the empire itself. So much of the art from the Roman Empire that stood the test of time revolves around sexual acts, including masturbation. While we may look at the Romans’ attitudes towards masturbation and think of that as a thing of the past, it is important to realize that we have not strayed far from those ideals that they had in the ancient times.

A great number of different Latin words were used to describe the act of masturbation in Ancient Rome. Words such as frico , sollicito, tango, tracto, contrecto, truso, trudo, tero (p. 183), haereo, deglubo, glubo, and rado were all used depending on the exact situation that was being described. For instance, frico was often seen as the most vulgar version of masturbation while others such as tracto were just as common but had less of a vulgar connotation behind them. The word for masturbation most commonly used by the Romans was masturbor, which is where the English word masturbate comes from. The exact origin of the word is unknown, but many scholars have suggested that it derives from the latin word for hand, manus, and stupare, which means to defile. This means that the literal definition of the word is “to defile with the hand.”

This translation is very indicative of the attitudes that Romans, particularly upper class Romans, had towards the act of masturbation. Another translation of the word suggests that “mas” is referring to male genitalia and the word takes on a much more literal form if this is the case. Masturbator was a far less vulgar way of stating the act, but it still remained something that was looked down upon by the wealthy elites in Rome.

On top of the many words used to describe the act of masturbation in Rome, there were also countless euphemisms that poets, playwrights, writers, and even everyday people used to poke fun at the act and those who participate in it. Most often people would refer to the left hand or saying the “amica manus,” which refers to the hand being a friend, to subtly joke about masturbation. The Romans were well versed in the art of the dick joke, to the point where some were even ingrained into the religion of the Romans. Mutto, as used in the Latin satirist Lucelius’s work, was a deity of marriage and was the physical embodiment of the penis. Roman writers of all kinds would refer to the left hand as a girlfriend. This just means that Roman writers, especially not the super famous ones, were not getting any. While sad, it did provide the world with an abundance of euphemisms and jokes for masturbation. All the metaphoric versions of masturbation made for much flowery language throughout Latin poetry and writing. Even the most beautiful of the works could not escape such jokes.

In Roman life, masturbation was not something that people just did whenever and however they pleased. It was an act that had a certain amount of ritual behind it. It was believed that the god Mercury passed the act down to his son, who in turn taught the shepherds how to do it. Most prominent, of course, was the Romans’ use of the left hand for masturbation. There were deities that represented sexuality and marriage, penises in particular. These deities were both made fun of and worshipped at the same time. Sex was at the center of Roman culture and religion, so it was impossible to escape the phallic imagery that showed itself around every corner. The exact origin of this practice is unknown, but it is well known that in Roman society and much of the ancient world the left hand was inferior to the right. It was meant for doing the filthy things such as masturbation or getting rid of one’s own excrements. This is likely due to the fact that the majority of people were and still are right hand dominant. Masturbation did not exist outside of society, and therefore was subject to the rules and expectations society puts on it.

In general, the Romans were a bunch of prudes when it came to masturbation. They were not nearly as sexually liberated as their Greek cousins. Thus, any serious conversation about the act of masturbation is very difficult to come across. This mixed with the fact that the wealthy elites preferred having sex with slaves to masturbating themselves solidifies that sexual pleasure was not something of much discussion in the Roman world. Masturbation was seen as something that was for the poor or the slaves. Many of the people who were for masturbation got the ideas from Greek philosophers such as Diogenes, one of the most prominent Cynics. The followers of cynicism and other philosophies differed from the general consensus of the writers and elites of Rome. Much like it is today, someone needing to masturbate instead of being able to find someone to have sex with is something to make fun of someone for. In Roman culture, that is exactly what happened. All walks of Roman life are filled with jokes and insults regarding masturbation and rarely was it put in a positive light when discussing it.

Roman society dictated that masturbation was not seen as an act that everyone should participate in. Far from that, in fact, considering that evidence suggests that masturbation was something that was only for the slaves in the Roman world. The wealthy elites would use slaves instead of masturbating, a practice that is now looked down upon but was just a part of Roman society at the time. The line between prostitution and rape was very thin and very grey. The Roman poet Martial described the differences between the wealthy form of “masturbation” and what we consider masturbation today through his own desires. The famous poet wrote “at mihi succurrit pro Ganymede manus” (the hand of me relieved me as a substitute for Ganymede) (Martial 2.42). Ganymede refers to a slave that he would orefer to have sex with. Since he can not purchase him, though, he must settle for his own hand to be used to get off. This was the common practice in Roman society. Masturbation was a sign that you were unable to purchase sexual pleasure if you wanted it. Martial also describes slaves being the ones who most often participate in masturbation. He wrote in another of his epigrams “Masturbabantur Phrygii post ostia servi, / Hectoreo quotiens sederat uxor equo” (The Trojan slaves used to masturbate behind the door when the wife of Hector mounted her steed) (Martial 11.104). The way the verse sounds makes it known that this is a dirty act for the slaves to be participating in. It is a low act in the eyes of Martial. This is indicative of the way much of the wealthy elites in Rome viewed masturbation. The association masturbation had with poverty and slavery is part of the reason it was never talked about in any serious light, especially in the writings that have survived to this day.

Unlike masturbation among men, female masturbation and sexual pleasure was a topic seldom talked about in both the daily lives of Romans and in the writings that they left behind. Ancient pottery and art shows that it was something that was happening but it was not a topic that people gave much care to or even discussed. Frescoes in Pompeii show imagery of someone performing cunillingus on a woman, proof that the sexual experience was for more than just procreation for the Romans. An inscription on a wall of Pompeii also proves that female masturbation and pleasure was taken into account by at least a few people. It reads “cunnum tibi fricabo,” meaning “I shall rub your cunt.” Though the phrase may be vulgar, it shows that the practice of female masturbation for pleasure was one that was not unheard of. Other sources say that women would use phallic objects to masturbate, though some (mainly male) historians claim that this was not for pleasure but instead to prepare a woman to have sex with a man. “Double ended dildos” even existed during this time. While cis, straight, male historians may not understand the purpose of this primitive sex toy, anyone with a vagina can infer exactly what toys like these were being used for. Not much has changed since the Roman times and masturbation among women continues to be taboo to speak about, but much like it does now, it was always happening in the shadows.

Woman receiving cunillingus

Roman double ended dildo

Despite these feelings towards masturbation, porn was still very much something that existed in the Roman world. The Romans participated in sexual acts that were well obviously meant for pleasure and not for procreation, both among men and women. Pompeii being the best preserved look at the average Roman life we have today, much of the surviving art and architecture we have comes from there. The walls of brothels were lined with erotic images of people engaging in sexual intercourse, something that could be interpereted as an ancient form of porn. Pornography was a part of many homes throughout the city and plenty of erotic images could be found all over. All kinds of erotic imagery can be found throughout Pompeii. Not only vanilla sex, too. If Pompeii shows us anything about erotic imagery in the Roman world, it is that the Romans were not against non-vanilla sex. The art of Rome shows people in all kinds of positions and with more than one partner. Homosexuality was accepted to a certain degree. It was something that only accepted the dominant role in the relationship, meaning the masculine top was the one who society would accept. The Romans had some of the sexual liberty that the Greeks had, but were far more prude when it comes to showing it. Sexual endeavors were meant for within private walls and not to be discussed in public.

Threesome in Pompeii building

Sexual scene in Pompeii home

One place where Roman sexuality could flourish in whichever way it seemed fit was within the walls of the many brothels. As discussed earlier, soliciting sex was seen as a more elite form of masturbation for the Romans. Brothels and bath houses were common for the common folk, and the more powerful Roman citizens could purchase slaves to have sex with instead. In major cities such as Pompeii, you can still see the phallic images that adorned the floors, each pointing towards the nearest brothel. This kind of advertisement worked well as foreigners and sailors who could not read or speak the Latin language could understand where to find what they were looking for. The buildings were adorned with the imagery shown above, either to arouse guests or to show them how to do certain sexual acts. The rooms themselves were small, though; cells big enough for only the bed. Both male and female prostitutes worked within the walls, all performing the role of the submissive, as masculine men were the only acceptable man in Roman culture.

Sign pointing to Pompeii brothel

Inside of Pompeii brothel

Even though the Romans looked down upon masturbation and those who participated in it, they loved to talk about how funny it was. Masturbation can be found all throughout the remains of Rome that we have. The topic is scattered throughout Roman poetry, theatre, and literature. Writers would use elaborate metaphors to allude to masturbation without ever having to really talk about it. Some pieces may seem beautiful and romantic on the surface when they are actually quite vulgar. The writers were not the only one who indulged in writing jokes about masturbation, though. Graffiti about the act has been found all throughout the remains of Pompeii and elsewhere throughout the empire. This was a form of humor that anyone could participate in and understand. It did not require knowledge of history, culture, or even how to read. Sexual humor is the most accessible kind of humor there is. Because of that, there is so much writing making sexual jokes that has survived into the modern era. In summary, sex, and therefore masturbation, weaved its way into every walk of Roman life.

Satire, no matter what kind of medium it takes, has a massive part of society’s humor as far back as the Greeks and Romans. The Romans, in particular, were masters of satire. No where was that better shown than in their vast quantity and quality of masturbation jokes. They ranged from small quips such as satirists making jokes about their own penises to entire stories revolving around lonely dicks. Horace, a famous Roman writer best known for his many satires, discusses his penis in many of his satires. In one of them, Horace writes about penis “sobbing/heaving” by using the verb “singultire.” Thinking about the motion that someone sobbing has, it is easy to infer that this is simply a euphemism for his penis throbbing. Many of Rome’s most famous satirists wrote entire stories about their penises. Even the earliest satirist, Lucilius, writes stories around the penis and the release that it needs. He writes an entire satire about the phallic deity, Mutinus Titinus, or as he called him, Mutto. In this satire, Mutto has a girlfriend with a rather peculiar name. Lucilius writes “at laeva lacrimas muttoni absterget amica” (with his lover of left hand he wiped the tears from his penis) (Lucilius v. 335). Laeva refers to his girlfriend, “Lefty,” and how she wipes the liquid away from his manhood. Once again, this is an obvious case of a satirist using innuendo to talk about masturbation. Getting off exists in so much more than just satire, though, as writers all throughout the empire put jokes and innuendos about masturbation in their works.

In some sense, almost all poetry written by the Romans has something to do with sex, penises, and masturbation. No works are free from some discussion about it. Famous poets from all Roman times write about sexual pleasure. Particularly in the comedic genre, masturbation jokes and stories were extremely common. Whether it be straight forward or through extended metaphor, Roman poets absolutely loved to talk about masturbation. From those who are relatively unknown to some of the most famous poets in Roman history, every single one talked about masturbation in some sense. Catullus, one of the most famous Latin poets in history, wrote so very many allusions to his own penis and what he does with it. Arguably his most famous poem, Catullus II, is about a bird on the surface. Looking a little deeper, it is obvious to see that the poem is actually about his own penis. He ends the poem by saying “tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem // et tristis animi levare curas” (if only I could play with you just so and ease the sad troubles of your mind) (Catullus 2.9-10). Catullus’s sadness over his girlfriend being too sad to have sex with him leads him to just want to pleasure himself. It does not bring him the same kind of pleasure, though, so it is not something that he will do. Other Latin poetry is not as subtle when talking about masturbation. The Priapeia were a collection of poems regarding all things sexual in Ancient Rome. It also condemns masturbation as something that is lowly. The unknown author says “Tam tremulum crissat, tam blandum prurit, ut ipsum, // Masturbatorem fecent Hippolytum” (She wiggles herself so tremendously and excites lubricious passions, that she would Hippolytus himself a masturbator) (Priapeia 53). Hippolytus is the son of Theseus and is appalled by all things sexual and therefore would never think of masturbating. The idea that masturbation is not something someone should do (although it was being done all over the empire) holds true in this passage. In Greek mythology, The passage also shows there existed a very interesting dichotomy between the social stigma of masturbation and the primal desire to release in that way. The Latin poets did an excellent job of expressing this primal desire among the societal pressure that surrounded masturbation.

The place where the majority of talk about masturbation exists not on the page, but on the wall. Graffiti lines the walls of the surviving Roman cities, adorning plenty of dick jokes and masturbation confessions. Pompeii provides an excellent example of that, as it was so well preserved by the very eruption that destroyed it. On the walls of one Pompeii building, a man scribbled “multa mihi curae cum esserit artus has ego macinas, stagna refusa, dabo” (when my worries oppress my body, with my left hand, I release my pent-up fluids) (Younger). Writings such as this one can still be found all throughout the city. In one of the cities basilicas, another person just pokes fun at the reader, saying “Pum[pei]s fueere quondam ‘Vibii’ opulentissumi || non ideo tenuerunt in manu sceptrum pro mutunio || itidem quod tu factitas cottidie in manu penem tenes” (at one time, the Vibii were the most noble at Pompeii. For that reason, they did not hold the sceptre in hand like a penis, as you do habitually in the same manner every day, holding the member in your hand). The Romans were colorful with their language, but the subject remains the same. They are able to discuss the most vulgar of topics this way. Phrases are not the only graffiti adorning the walls either. Imagery of penises and other sexual acts adorn the walls of the Roman Empire as well. The image below shows a graffiti image of a penis that was carved into the wall of a place conquered by the Roman army. Graffiti has not evolved much from the Roman times until now, as almost everyone has likely seen a penis just like that one drawn in a bathroom stall. Graffiti is an interesting source to look at because it was not written by the famous writers or the wealthy elites; it was written by the everyday people who lived within the city walls. It is one of the few sources that show the perspective of the common folk.

The graffiti on the walls of the Roman Empire gives great insight into what kind of humor the everyday person found funny. Thus, it is one of the strangest but most important sources to look at when looking into comedy in Rome.

Pompeii graffiti

Phallic graffiti

Roman theatre is yet another walk of life that is injected with jokes about penises and masturbation. Roman theatre was not known for being the most civil place to be, as it was riddled with themes that were not exactly safe for the eyes and ears of children. Thus, jokes about masturbation were all too common. One of the famous comedy playwrights of the Roman Empire was Plautus. His comedies were well adorned with sexual humor and dick jokes, as was common among Roman comedies. He did not write about the wealthy elites; he wrote about everyday Romans. Thus, he could use sexual humor and insults without worry of upsetting anyone with any serious power. Even part of the name he used, Titus, was a dick joke, as Titus was slang for penis during the time he was writing. Throughout his plays he would make references to penises and He would make jokes about a man’s “gladius” which literally translates to sword but was a Roman euphemism for penis. It is believed that Plautus took much inspiration from the Greek comedies, but jokes such as that one are entirely Roman. Comedic theatre from the Roman Empire was made for the common folk and therefore needed to have humor that the common folk could relate to. While not much has survived into the modern era, that that has is riddled with puns and jokes about anything and everything sexual.

While it is easy to push the Romans aside and call them prudes when it comes to the subject of masturbation in comparison to today, it is not that simple. We are prudes in the same way that the Romans were. We know that masturbation is going on and it is easy to make jokes about but it is rarely a topic of discussion, much less serious discussion. Female masturbation continues to be something so taboo that we refuse to acknowledge its existence and instead pretend that it does not exist. Female sexual pleasure in general is only now becoming something that is important to the sexual experience. The Romans had a complicated relationship with masturbation and sexuality in general, an idea that trickles into the ideas modern society still has.

It is easier to joke about sexual pleasure, particularly masturbation, than it is to have serious conversations about what is going on. The population may be obsessed with sex and everything that surrounds it, but they do not want to actually face the facts of what it is and what it means.

People in the modern age take a “holier than thou” approach when it comes to looking at the sexual practices of the ancient era versus today. The reality is that we have not progressed nearly as far as people like to think we have. Sexual pleasure remains something that is very primal for humans, even if we choose not to believe so. Masturbation has a long but secretive history in Ancient Rome. While being something that there is very little serious literature or history behind, it had a massive presence all throughout the empire. Whether it be on the walls of Pompeii, the brothels of Rome, or the pottery of Naples, self pleasure has its lasting depictions everywhere in Rome. The Romans had rules associated with masturbation. There was a stigma behind it and while it was practiced everywhere, it was not something that anyone should be proud of doing. The only places where the act could live freely in Roman culture was through humor. Satire, graffiti, poetry, and all other forms of literature in the empire had some level of phallic and masturbation humor scattered throughout. We see a similar thing in society today. Though we pretend that we have advanced so far beyond the ancient world, in reality we are in a very similar place. Our desire to feel pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure, is a primal one. Though how we go through the world and how we interact with each other has changed drastically, there are some things that have not and likely will not change.

Works Consulted

Adams, James Noel. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Barber, Helen, Esther (2011) Plautus and the Sentimental Ideal of the Roman Family, Durham

theses, Durham University.

Catullus, Gaius Valerius. The Complete Poetry of Catullus. Madison :University of Wisconsin

Press, 2002.

Chrystal, Paul. In Bed with the Romans. United Kingdom, Amberley Publishing, 2015.

Fiske, George Converse. Lucilius and Horace: a Study in the Classical Theory of Imitation.

Univ. of Wisconsin, 1920.

Henderson, John. Writing Down Rome: Satire, Comedy, and Other Offences in Latin Poetry.

United Kingdom, OUP Oxford, 1998.

Johnson, Marguerite. “The Grim Reality of the Brothels of Pompeii.” The Conversation , 17 Oct.

2020, theconversation.com/the-grim-reality-of-the-brothels-of-pompeii-88853.

Keegan, P. “Writing and drawing on the walls of Pompeii: how the study of graffiti relates to the

HSC ancient history core syllabus for 2006.” (2005)

Lucci, Joseph M., “Hidden in Plain Sight: Martial and the Greek Epigrammatic Tradition”

(2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1864.

Martial, , J P. Sullivan, and Peter Whigham. Epigrams of Martial. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1987. Print.

Smithers, Leonard C. “PRIAPEIA.” The Priapeia , 2000, www.sacred-texts.com/cla/priap

/priapeia.htm.

Sullivan, J. P.. Martial: The Unexpected Classic. United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press,

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Varone, Antonio, and Berg, R.. Erotica pompeiana : love inscriptions on the walls of Pompeii.

Italy, “Erma” di Bretschneider, 2002.

Younger, John G. Sex in the Ancient World from A to Z . Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,

2009.

41

Why Are We So Uncomfortable? The Confusing Taboo of Menstruation in Ancient Rome and Modern America

by Alex Coleman

We heard the whispers of “Did I bleed through?” in the hallways, saw discreet sanitary product handoffs, and planned undercover trips to the Nurse’s office for Advil. A new competition emerged for the female-bodied students: “Didn’t you already get it?” Feelings of pride and maturity clashed with anxiety and fear––what would happen if I bled through during tennis practice, where I was the only girl in a group of sixteen boys? What if I had to tell someone I wasn’t going home because of a stomach ache, but because my cramps were so bad it hurt to stand up?

These kinds of experiences surrounding menstruation characterized much of middle school for me. I experienced the confusing and contradictory emotions that are so common for young girls––until I stopped getting my period completely. As a very slim, slightly underweight, competitive athlete, I lived without a period for almost three years during high school. Part of me took it as a marker of my dedication: that I worked my body so hard it had nothing left to spare for menstruation. Part of me liked being able to say, “I just don’t get my period” to my friends. Its non-existence tricked me into feeling slimmer and lighter, as though I didn’t have to carry this burden of being a healthy young woman. After countless conversations with my doctor, who emphasized that in spite of my high activity level and slim build, thiswas not normal, I made an effort to gain weight and get my period back during senior year. It took me a long time to understand that lacking a period was not some kind of accomplishment––I needed to do everything in my power to help my body to function the way it was meant to.

After not having my period for so long, I basically celebrated when it finally returned. I felt so much joy in my body for coming such a long way both physically and menatlly. I had to realize that, while menstruating did not make me into the young woman I am, it is a necessary part of me developing into the woman I will become. Getting my period back helped me to accept the changes I saw in my body––it helped me see that this at times terrifying experience was actualized and worth it. Once I actively tried and succeeded to restart my own menstruation, I realized it was never something to have felt embarrassed of. I accepted for the first time since freshman year that I could be a healthy young woman and a successful athlete. I had no idea I would physically feel the best and strongest I had ever felt once my period returned, too. And while it would be crazy to say I love getting my period––because who would ever, ever, say that-–I have a respect and appreciation for all that my body is capable of that I genuinely did not have before.

It angers me to think of the shame, anxiety, and fear female-bodied people have experienced and currently experience due to their menstruation. My own experience has made me fascinated by the general confusion and taboos that surround menstruation: How can society ostracize and shame female-bodied people for something they cannot control, especially when it is the very reason humans come into existence? I want to imagine how we can change the language surrounding menstruation. The men who have written the sparse literature that exists on this topic are illogical, sexist, and contradictory to themselves and each other. It is overwhelming to sort through the origins of these misogynistic myths, and the ensuing stigma placed on female-bodied people. By exploring the practices and taboo of menstruation in Ancient Rome and comparing this research with modern America and my own experience, I hope to shine some light on the shared struggles of female-bodied people in a society that upholds male bodies as the ideal and is dictated by male fear.

I will use the terms “female-bodied people” (FBP) and “women and girls” for different purposes throughout this exploration. When writing about the general experiences of people who menstruate, I will use the term FBP, because I want to honor the experiences of people who menstruate but do not identify as women. In instances when the connotations of gender are significant and the identity of being a girl or woman comes into question, I will use the terms girl and woman. I am not perfect, but I will do my very best to be as inclusive as possible.

In classical myths, menstruation was commonly explained as the result of a curse placed on women (Hufnagel 2012, 19). The idea that a greater, supernatural power chose to condemn women to an uncomfortable experience suggests it is a kind of punishment––this takes away the fact that menstruation occurs naturally to FBP regardless of their actions or devotion to deities. It also stirs up the first feelings of shame associated with menstruation, because a “curse” is inherently not something to be proud of. These types of widespread beliefs made it easy for the patriarchy to create attitudes much more vicious than external ostracization toward menstruating FBP; it created feelings of self-loathing within FBP themselves. The job of males who wished to suppress female bodies and freedoms was made even easier.

The attitudes toward menstruation in Ancient Rome originated with a split between the ancient Greek philosophies of Aristotle and Hippocrates. While Aristotle was a philosopher trying to theoretically make sense of phenomena such as reproduction and sexual differentiation, Hippocrates was a physician focused on the physiological differences between sexes that lead to distinct functional differences. There is a noticeable contrast between their philosophical and pragmatic, medical viewpoints, respectively.

Aristotle’s view of menstruation and reproduction largely stemmed from the overarching idea that female bodies are inferior to male bodies, specifically in the way that each sex contributes to producing offspring. His reasoning for this inferiority was that females lack internal “heat” while males do not (Aristotle 1942, 373). Now this idea, while obviously lacking any scientific evidence, only confirms the fact that many of the beliefs I will mention later are made by leaps of logic and reason by male thinkers to other and control female bodies. Aristotle logicized that, while females and males both have the purpose of “generation,” the male provides the “seed” of reproduction while the female only provides the place in which reproduction occurs (13). According to Aristotle, the female does not produce a reproductive “seed” as the male does; since menstrual blood is the next closest thing to a reproductive agent, and it does not directly contribute to the production of offspring, Aristotle categorized it as semen’s inferior (97). Here, we get back to the idea of warmth––since males produce seed and generate inside of the female, and “all concoction works by means of heat,” males naturally generate heat while females do not (387). And of course, it was generally accepted that being hot was better than being cold. With this logic as his basis, Aristotle goes on to call women “mutilated males” throughout his work Generation of Animals, suggesting that females are not fully formed independent creatures. He reasons, “we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature” (461). The male body is thus established as the ideal which female bodies are unable to reach. Menstruation to Aristotle is not a marker of health for female bodies; it simply shows that a female can have children. This dynamic outlined by Aristotle allows later male physicians and philosophers to condemn and subjugate female bodies without significant, if any, backlash.

Hippocrates approached menstruation with the idea that variations between sexes were important to understand because they required different treatment for illness. He, unlike Aristotle, thought of female bodies as completely formed and separate from male bodies, while still obviously reliant on males for reproduction. To Hippocrates, the main cause of these physical differences was that a female’s flesh is “spongy” and “loose” compared to that of males, and therefore females retain more fluid and moisture (Hippocrates 1975, 572). Hippocrates believed that this fluid excess, which proves to be a very important concept throughout beliefs on menstruation in the ancient world, must be combatted through menstruation or else the body will become sick or even die (573). This medical reasoning acts as one of the first justifications for male physicians and thinkers to create methods of “driving” and stopping menstruation. Hippocrates suggested methods such as vapor baths, pessaries, fumigations, and potions to restart menstruation (578). The Hippocratian view, unlike the Aristotalean and most proceeding views, tried to control menstruation in an effort to improve female health. But this idea of “health” was not for a female to be able to live her life freely with a sound body; as Rebecca Flemming (2000, 117) says in her book Medicine and the Making of Roman Women, “for the Hippocratics, a woman’s health depends on her reproductive activity; fulfilling her social role makes her healthy.” Although Hippocrates recognized the different sexes and did not pit them against each other like Aristotle, he did not examine women’s health for the betterment of FBP, but for the purpose of “generation.”

These early Greek thinkers set the tone for Roman philosophers and physicians’ ideas on menstruation. There is a common theme of males attempting to use menstruation to other female bodies through taboo, superstition, and blatant ostracization. The contradictory nature of the widely ranging beliefs on menstruation makes it an even more confusing topic; the lack of cohesiveness in thought across different scholars, combined with the lack of writing on the topic itself, make it a difficult concept to understand. Historians have suggested that the scarcity of literature on the topic of menstruation is due to men’s fear of it and of menstrual blood; menstruation is one of the few occurrences that has always happened to women regardless of their relationships with men (Hufnagel 2012, 20). This is fascinating because menstruation and menstrual blood were the crux of male efforts to “other” and even demonize women. Men seemed to accept the little information on this topic as gospel, eager to have a legitimate excuse backed by “science” for treating women as their inferiors.

It is necessary to understand that this cultural stigma and othering of female bodies due to menstruation often began before menstruation itself. Aristotle and Hippocrates agreed that the average age of menarche was fourteen (Hufnagel 2012, 16). But, since some females begin menstruating at the age of twelve, this was considered the legal age of marriage in Ancient Rome (17). This implies that legally, girls become women at the age of twelve, regardless of their bodies’ physical maturity, while societally, it was thought that menstruation marked the maturation of girls becoming women (Flemming 2000, 160). Logically, this makes no sense. It implies that girls were treated as women when their fathers needed to marry them off to another man, and that once they married, they became their husband’s property. A girl in this situation would then be subject to any and all of her husband’s sexual demands, regardless of her ability to reproduce. Yet the socially “acceptable” time for a girl to begin engaging in sexual activity was thought to be once she started menstruating, and she could have been married earlier than this time (235). This created a dynamic that put young women in a powerless position; all at once, they were victims of legal, familial, and societal expectations that were arbitrary and inconsistent. They had to deal with all of this along with the normal confusion and mixed emotions surrounding puberty and reaching adulthood. The amount of loneliness and dissociation from their physical selves these young women must have experienced is incomprehensible.

Throughout ancient Roman literature, the characterizations of and superstition toward menstruating females can be described in one word: absurd. Pliny the Elder was one Roman physician whose ideas on menstruation became widely popularized and accepted. In his encyclopedic-like work Natural History, Pliny makes many references to women’s health, and unlike most scholars of his similar background, he writes extensively on menstruation. His beliefs are so outlandish and beyond the realm of logic, it is honestly a bit impressive; the creativity and time it must have taken for him to come up with some of the myths he circulated show his dedication to ruining the image of menstruating FBP.

The way in which menstruating FBP are depicted throughout Pliny’s work is significant. Pliny explains that while menstruating, some FBP just “walk…through the middle of the fields with their clothes pulled up above the buttocks. In other places the custom is kept up for them to walk barefoot, with hair dishevelled and with girdle loose” (Pliny the Elder 1963, 57). This description implies menstruating FBP experienced a kind of dissociation from reality and socially acceptable behavior. They are weak, at the whims of this cursed bodily process that so wholly take over and alters their entire state of being. This phrase also suggests that a menstruating woman is less of a woman in the eyes of men; she can no longer keep up her appearance, be attractive, or perform her womanly duties if she walks around barefoot, disheveled, and half-naked.

Pliny goes on to write that menstruating FBP will kill plants and entire fields of crops, cause bees to leave their hives, and make “caterpillars, worms, beetles and other vermin fall to the ground” from their presence (57). As much as the content of the writing itself, the language Pliny uses to describe these phenomena is indicative of the cultural sentiment toward menstruation. He writes that “purple too is tarnished then by the woman’s touch” when she is menstruating, because “So much greater then is the power of a menstruous woman” (57). Due to the historic difficulty of producing purple dye, the color purple has earned a connotation with royalty and high status since the era of Ancient Greece (Melina 2011, par. 1-3). Pliny’s statement implies that a menstruating woman poses a threat not only to nature, but to those at the top of the social hierarchy and order of Rome itself. Coincidentally or not, those at the top of this hierarchy are entirely men. The word “tarnish” implies menstruating women are dirty too, and will ruin the pristine society men have worked so hard to engineer. Perhaps this patriarchy, not the color purple, is what is actually being threatened.

While there is much discussion on menstruating women’s ability to end life, Pliny also writes significantly about their influences on birth and the early stages of life. He specifies that “young vines are irremediably harmed by the touch” of a menstruating woman, which suggests menstruating women either stunt growth or prey on vulnerable, weaker beings (Pliny the Elder 1963, 57). There is also an interesting relationship brought up between menstruation and pregnancy. Pliny writes that a pregnant mare will miscarry if touched, and in some cases even looked at by a menstruating FBP (57). He also explains that if a pregnant woman somehow comes into contact with menstrual blood, or even “steps over it,” she too will miscarry (58). Although the logic behind these ideas could never be sound, perhaps they were simply an effort to make FBP feel even more shame in menstruation; to men like Pliny, it was so taboo and dirty, it could even damage pregnancy, the very thing it enables.

Patriarchal society as a whole perpetuated beliefs that attempted to shame and other female bodies. This widespread taboo, however, did not equate widespread shared knowledge about menstruation. Men latched onto the idea that menstruation was a necessary purging of the female “excess”––or katharsis––but aside from this, men could hardly come to a consensus on menstruation (Flemming 2000, 235). Some thinkers such as Soranus asserted that while menstruation was essential for katharsis, it otherwise did not play a role in women’s health (236). On the other hand, thinkers such as Celsus suggested that menstruation and menstrual regularity were important to female health, and that a lack of menstruation would cause ailments or even death. Therefore, he suggested that non-menstruating FBP be bled in place of a natural katharsis. Celsus’ theory, although it acknowledges the importance of menstruation in female health, is still centered around the idea of purging excess; that the female body’s natural function is to rid itself of something harmful it creates.

These different beliefs about menstruation that induced shame in FBP culminated in one overarching theme: that a woman who does not reproduce, and therefore does not menstruate, is a worthless woman. So while men shame and other females for menstruating, it is also the one aspect that solidifies a female’s status as a woman, because it allows her to bear children. The common belief across history that women were only valued for their reproductive potential holds true here, as does the sentiment that no matter what a woman is or does, she is never enough––she is damned if she menstruates, and damned if she doesn’t.

As depicted earlier by Hippocrates, male Roman thinkers made noticeable efforts to control menstruation. Discordides and Pliny the Elder each devised over one-hundred ways “to drive” or to stop menstruation through various plants, rituals, and substances (Flemming 2000, 161). While it could be thought that these physicians were simply doing their best to understand and help FBP with a confusing bodily process, this is unlikely. These men often contradicted themselves on whether menstruation was even an important aspect of female health, and surely contradicted each other. It is more likely that these attempts to control female menstruation stemmed from male fear. The taboos, superstition, and general confusion men engineered across thousands of years allowed them to manipulate the one thing about women they could not own or take away under the law. It was a power struggle between the male patriarchy and nature.

Contrasting the experience of maturation for girls in Ancient Rome to that of boys demonstrates the stark difference in gender standards due to patriarchal ideals. Menarche for girls was thought to hold the same significance as the first sexual act performed by boys (160). Both of these milestones were seen as indicators of maturation, and certainly that reproduction was now possible. But the connotations were significantly different. For girls, maturation was defined as their ability to bear children and essentially settle into society’s narrow definition of womanhood; there was no time for self-exploration, and forget about pleasure. For boys, having and acting on a sexual awakening made them into men. There was no burdensome physical process like menstruation or pregnancy that tethered them to a societal role the second they became adults.

Similarly, there was an attempt by male thinkers to somehow equate the experience of menstruation for women to a physical experience for men. When signs of “melancholia” were seen after the end of menstruation or haemorrhoidal flux in men, phlebotomy was used as a treatment in both instances (217). These two “ailments” were treated as homologous, each having to do with letting out the “excess” of the human body (217). Yet the male version was not unique only to male bodies, nor did it carry the gendered and reproductive weight of menstruation. This thinking makes it seem like men almost felt left out by menstruation––another example of them not being able to bear the thought that FBP could experience or be in charge of something that has nothing to do with men. Once again, the contradictory thinking and behavior of men strips FBP of menstrual, and therefore bodily, agency and pride.

The shame and stigma experienced by FBP have continued through present day––as put by Glenda Hufnagel (2012, 8) in A History of Women’s Menstruation from Ancient Greece to the Twenty-First Century, “The current practice of silencing and shaming menarcheal girls in Western culture may be traced to Greek and Roman written documents, which state that women’s bodies are inferior to men’s.” The “silencing” aspect of our culture is often overlooked; FBP not only experience shame and fear due to menstruation, but they are supposed to keep quiet and pretend it does not exist. For people who identify as girls or women, the societal pressure to treat menstruation as taboo makes it difficult to fully embrace womanhood. For people who menstruate but do not identify as women, the  “silencing” takes on an additional meaning. Not only have the voices of non-binary and transgender individuals been excluded from the narrative of menstruation throughout history, but the gender confines associated with menstruation leave little room for their experiences. In spite of the negative connotations of menstruation, we as a society have determined that to menstruate is to be a woman. This narrow-minded thinking is not conducive to supporting people with gender dysphoria, for whom menstruation might already feel like an extremely uncomfortable part of life.

Menstruation has existed since female bodies came onto this Earth––but we are only at the beginning of accepting, honoring, and celebrating female bodies for all that they are capable of. This past week, Scotland made history by becoming the first country to make all menstrual products free. Menstruation is finally becoming more normalized across platforms such as social media, and celebrities and athletes are slowly becoming more open to the public about their experiences with menstruation. Yet we, even in niches of society that claim to be “progressive,” still struggle to openly and properly address menstruation. To get over this hurdle, this feeling of discomfort when the word “period” is mentioned in conversation, we need to change our thinking. This calls for a kind of open discussion that must expand far beyond “feminist media.” The separate rooms for boys and girls in early school-run sex education should not exist––this binary division is not only outdated, but it initiates the feelings of shame in FBP that are so hard to abandon. We have to teach children of all genders that menstruation is something to acknowledge openly instead of something to keep secret. Including males in the experience and discussion of menstruation is a necessary part of changing the language we use and the attitudes we hold. A language of neutrality toward menstruation would best acknowledge what it is; a normal, everyday occurrence that is simply a fact of life. At the least, this will give back some of the bodily power and autonomy FBP have been stripped of across the centuries. Perhaps men will feel less like the normalization of menstruation is a threat to their own masculinity. At best, it will end the feelings of fear and shame on both sides that ultimately serve no one.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. https://ccl.on.worldcat.org/oclc/855672780.

Flemming, Rebecca. Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hippocrates. Diseases of Women. Translated by Ann Ellis Hanson. I. Vol. I. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1975. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173068.

Hufnagel, Glenda Lewin. A History of Women’s Menstruation from Ancient Greece to the Twenty-First Century: Psychological, Social, Medical, Religious, and Educational Issues. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012.

Melina, Remy. “Why Is the Color Purple Associated With Royalty?” LiveScience. Purch, June 3, 2011. https://www.livescience.com/33324-purple-royal-color.html.

Pliny the Elder. “XXIII.” Essay. In Pliny: Natural History, translated by W. H. S. Jones, 55–57. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1963. https://ccl.on.worldcat.org/oclc/313293.

42

Rome and America, Rome(in) America, Roman America

by James Gernstein

This is probably the most excited I have ever been to write about anything. Rome and America are so intertwined, politically, culturally, and morally. I think this discussion is worthless without context especially because I’m trying to reach more than just a purely academic audience. I want this to be entertaining. I will be poking fun and reverence at this topic. This in fact will be a judgement piece. Don’t worry, I intend to back up my judgement with facts. Personally, I find anybody who writes an article from an “objective” point of view is lying. What is the point of writing something without contextually putting it in history? Honestly that is one of my biggest beefs with Classics as a whole. If we treat this as static, un-opinionated entity no one will care. Public perception is infinitely more important than the objective truth. Who cares whether or not Aeneas was a real person? Why not discuss what percentage of the population knew the story and how pervasive it was in policy making? Whether or not Caesar was accurate in his descriptions of battle is irrelevant when the citizens of Rome could have no idea whether or not he was lying. In order to make this paper more concise I will focus on the comparison between George W. Bush and Gaius Julius Caesar. I feel I have an obligation to announce my biases. On that note, I hate both of these men. They are both deplorable and prime examples of the failures of the institutions they were brought up in. Also. I am a 21 year old white man who has enjoyed the privileges of a private education my entire academic experience. I want to announce this as one of my biases. It’s not me trying to come off a superior. It is simply the lens I am examining this topic through.

Gaius Julius Caesar is undoubtably the most famous Roman in history. He expanded Rome’s territory from the Alps all the way to the English Channel, and he started the process which dragged Rome from a Republic to an Empire. He was assassinated on the floor of the Senate and changed Roman politics forever. Shakespeare wrote a play on his life and he invented an ancient version of trench warfare. Germany had a Kaiser and the Russians had a Czar. Napoleon invokes him by name in his battle planning. His idioms such as “I came, I saw, I conquered” or “The die has been cast” still reverberate around the world.   At the time of his invasion of Gaul, Caesar was a wildly successful general known for his aggressive tactics and almost cult-like following amongst his soldiers. He was part of an old patrician family which had recently been down on its luck politically. He framed himself as an ally to the common man, but he was an aristocrat through and through. He definitely ruffled the feathers of the conservative Roman senators. If the Romans love anything it’s tradition, so when Caesar was gaining power and popularity amongst the common people, they were threatened. In order to keep moving up the political ladder Caesar needed money in order to bribe the right officials. This practice was commonplace amongst the Roman elite, Caesar just did it so brazenly. The idea was to at least appear as if they had a real republic. The best way to make money as a Roman official was to become a governor of Roman territories because you could exploit the local population to your hearts content while you lounged around in a fancy ass villa in the countryside. For his work as a general Caesar was awarded the governance of Cisalpine Gaul or Northern Italy. So, how does Bush fit into all this?

George W. Bush is part of what I like to call the American Royal Family. Career politicians who are trained from birth how to best flex their political and monetary value in order to gain control of large swaths of this country. These politicians are part of an infinitesimally small group of people who singularly decide on the direction of our country. I’m not disagreeing that we have honest elections like some members of the modern political spectrum. Sorry Sydney Powell and Donald Trump, I’m not planning on encouraging your conspiracy bullshit. On the other hand, pretending that everyone in this country had an equal opportunity to be president is equally fictious. Family’s like the Kennedy’s, Clinton’s, and Bush’s have had their grimy fingers all over this country’s politics for decades. George W. Bush showed himself as this kid who grew up in midland Texas outside of a Houston which is known for its immigrant population and blue-collar workers. He was a politician of the people. Of course, he was born in New Haven, Connecticut and attended both Yale and Harvard. The Republican party has done a brilliant job both appealing to the wealthy wall street elite and the common blue-collar worker. Bush is a prime example of that. He enlisted in the Texas national guard and attended the most prestigious law school in the world. This dichotomy was essential to his rapid ascension of power in the American Political machine. They simultaneously hold people from their “American Dream” while blaming poor people and immigrants for the country’s woes. The Roman elite also blamed poor people for the demise of their country. In Rome’s case, they would blame their slaves. The elite grew their wealth exponentially while the common people would suffer lower wages. This accumulation of wealth in a very small percentage of the population brought the end of the Republic more than slaves of immigrants ever did. This similar accumulation of wealth is currently occurring in our own country. The pandemic has just quickened that process.

Caesar was ambitious almost to a fault, but in his own words he was lucky. Up until this point of Roman history Rome had shown no issue with taking over other territories for personal gain. This was how money was made, with plunder and taxes. Caesar was assigned as a governor of Northern Italy, so how could he not see the territory directly to his north ripe for the taking. He just needed an excuse. Gaul was split up into multiple tribes, one of which was called the Helvetii. While Caesar was the governor of Northern Italy the Helvetii were migrating west because the Germans were encroaching on their territory. Caesar sees this act as aggressive and attacks the tribe. Caesar needed to maintain support for a sustained Gallic campaign, so he began to write about his exploits in a series of writings called “De Bello Gallico” or “The War in Gaul”. Caesar sent copies back to Rome every couple of weeks, so people could be informed of his triumphs and the trickery of the Gauls. Reports would be made on the floor of the senate house and in the forum. Both plebians and patricians were given insider knowledge on Caesar’s movements and tactics (Rigsby) This was the only form of media the Romans had about the Gauls. Caesar had complete power on the public perception of the Gauls. He wasted no time painting them as barbarians which threated the very safety of the Roman republic. His propaganda worked brilliantly. He eventually gained enough adoration from the common people that the senate could not keep his power in check. Roman aristocrats had never really worried about the support of the common people until Caesar. Of course, he would happily dispose of the threat much to the joy of the Romans. Caesar kept up his war in Gaul for a decade growing exponentially more wealthy and powerful while his political allies kept his seat warm. Roman conservatives looked for ways to knock Caesar from his perch, but every avenue they pursued ended in a dead end (Goldsworthy).

One of the ways Caesar portrayed the Gauls as savages was their religion. The descriptions were vague and uncommon, but he made sure to talk about their love for human sacrifice. A researcher must keep in mind that Caesar was the only source of information on this subject. Give the masses little bit of information, and let their imaginations run wild. Caesar knew the Romans were already a superstitious people, so this information cemented the fear of the Gallic people (Rigsby). It’s much easier to hate a group of individuals if you can make them appear uncivilized and less than human. The United States used that tactic to scare its citizens about extremist Islam post 9/11.

After Al-Quade attacked the United States and destroyed the World Trade Center in September of 2001, the American people were angry and wanted vengeance. The leaders of this country were happy to give the American People what they wanted. The rhetoric that came out of the United States at this point was warmongering and calling for swift retribution. As a result, there was a massive uptick of hate crimes against Muslims in the United States. Members of different religions such as Sikh were also targeted because they were Middle Eastern in appearance (Bush). The animosity did not dissipate with time. Bush’s cabinet made sure of that. Of course, they had a solution. The invasion of Iraq was brought before congress, and it was overwhelmingly supported by both Democrats and Republicans.

The United States invaded Iraq in March of 2003 starting what is now referred to as the “War on Terror”. Most people would agree at this point over seventeen years later the war has been an unmitigated failure. Now, I obviously cannot put this all on President Bush. At the end of the day however, we invaded under his order. Perhaps it was hubris based on our success in Operation Desert Storm or just plain arrogance and greed. Like Caesar though, Bush needed a reason to start a war. This is certainly not the first war America started under suspicious circumstances and definitely was not the last. The United States government and population was in support of this war. The rhetoric used to justify this war was remarkably similar to Caesar’s. Bushed claimed the preemptive strike was necessary to ensure protection for the American people. At the beginning, the army went in with clear objectives. Famously, we were searching for hidden weapons of mass destruction that could wreak havoc on the world. The Unites States was going to free the oppressed Iraqi people (Bush) Saddam Hussein was shown as an evil dictator who would do anything to destroy America. As the war progressed and it became clear that the weapons of mass destruction did not exist the language changed. An emphasis on more abstract ideas such as democracy, freedom and terrorism were pushed. As support for the war soured, the government did not admit mistakes or apologize. We doubled down on our hatred of terrorism, and how it was our duty to help other countries. The war expanded to other countries and new enemies emerged in the media. One of these enemies was extremist Islam. The effects of this distrust and hate towards Islam are still seen very much today in this country.

Comparisons between Rome America started before America was founded. Founding fathers sat around about the government they wanted to form, and it kept coming back to Rome. Regardless of how the love started, it is no surprise America has always held Rome in high regards. Latin and Greek were taught in school as the expectation to be learned. Rome has been revered during the entirety of the United States existence. During the revolutionary war tired and desperate soldiers were shown the play of Cato the Younger (Rigsby). He was a staunch supporter of the Roman Republic until his death and actively attacked tyrants such as Caesar. The founding fathers were quick to draw comparisons to the ancient Romans and their respect for freedom and independence. Famous authors such as Livy and Horace write about their admiration for an agrarian lifestyle where farmers provided for themselves and their families. In the 1800s most of the American population lived in small rural towns spending a vast majority of their time farming. The founding fathers also respected the Republican form of government which the Romans used. Of course, this love was not independent to America. During the Enlightenment wealthy youth were schooled in both Latin and Greek across Europe. This admiration guided the United States possibly more than they intended. Americans have definitely leaned towards the ideals of freedom and honest work, but they also brought the oligarchical style of the Roman aristocrat. Rome placated the lower classes with promises of power and government assistance while keeping people in power continuously in power. The founding father upheld the defenders of the Roman Republic like Cicero and Cato while demonizing tyrants such as Caesar. The comparisons have since shifted to more imperialistic versions of Rome. Statues of emperor’s litter elite college campuses such as Brown. White supremacists mimic the same rhetoric about immigrants as the Romans. They are blamed for a lower quality of life amongst the working class. At the beginning of the empire Augustus implemented the concept of a “proper Roman family” and how they should carry themselves. The far right does a similar thing (Goldsworthy). They preach about how the left is attempting to destroy the nuclear familiar. To them a man should be strong and emotionless. Women should be timid and caring for the children. Children should be raised to learn about the greatness of America and how it is our responsibility to share our wealth with the world. Rome and the United States both invaded other countries to spread their wealth and their “superior” ways of life.

Latin is still taught in modern curriculum, but on a much smaller scale than it used to be. The study of Latin has fallen off but the influence is still clearly felt. Take the AP curriculum for example. Both required texts are imperialistic in nature. On one hand we have “De Bello Gallico” as prose which we’ve discussed in length already. The other required text is Vergil’s “Aeneid” which was written under the direction of the first emperor Augustus. The AP syllabus leaves very little to no time to discuss the context of both of these works. I was taught how to translate them not critically think about them. It was memorizing and reciting passages while recognizing grammatical rules. I had what I would describe as a very progressive Latin teacher in high school who did an amazing job at keeping us attentive with our work. I mean clearly, she did something right, because I am still here arguing about Ancient Rome as a Classics major. Of course, these problems are not just the fault of the AP curriculum. If that were true these problems would be exclusive to the small percentage of the population that decides to take AP Latin. The first memory I have of learning about Rome was in fifth grade. We were learning about the dark ages. The textbook taught us that the Romans and their authoritarian rule were missed in their former territories because of the stability they provided. It makes sense that our education system paints the colonization of other territories as an only positive aspect.  For a country that prides itself on individual freedoms we’re shown how governing other territories is beneficial to both quite frequently.

I’ve spent the last multiple paragraphs bashing everything about Caesar and the AP curriculum, so what is the point of studying this man? Why not let his memory die and we can start Classics anew? Whether we like it or not this man’s rhetoric has crawled his way into American life and political policy. Well that question was supposed to take an entire paragraph, and I kind of answered in a few sentences. I guess I’ll combine my talking point for my next paragraph into this one. How should we study Classics and Caesar? Should you be able to teach a Latin class without at least breaching the influences Rome has on our political spectrum? I am definitely idealist for saying no, but I’ll stick to my guns. This paper is quickly turning into a call for a teardown of the entire education system of this country. Of course, I do not have answers to all of these problems I am pointing out. If I did, I think these problems would have already been solved a longtime ago. At the very least, we should not shy away from these conversations though as Classicists and Academia in general. We need to let the people studying Caesar see the atrocities that occurred under his reign. He killed over one million Gauls and enslaved another million. That was never taught to me in my almost seven years of Latin education. The Gauls were not savages; they had a complex form of government and a religion which permeated across millions of people (Rigsby). Why do put the Romans on top unequivocally in the Ancient Mediterranean? Their only challengers in modern popularity in this country are the Greeks. The Greeks were a small collection of city states that were unified for only a handful of years. The great city of Sparta was a small village and the Athenians executed women for attending sporting events. Maybe we should re examine why the West has held these civilizations in such high esteem. What about the Etruscans? They were accomplished bronze workers, and portrayed their seminars with women present. That alone would have been unthinkable to both the Greeks or the Romans. It’s almost as if the founding fathers were all old white men. That’s how Roman senators and Greek philosophers were shown. Stop attributing the pervasion of Greek and Roman influences to their perfection. Those empires fell, and the American empire will fall as well.

For too long Classics has hid behind this barrier of both superiority and irrelevance. Its irrelevance has allowed itself to remain unchallenged by these calls for antiracism. Other fields of study such as history have been brought to the forefront of this conversation. It is time for Classics to do the same. Hopefully through this essay, I have shown some of the ways that American politics cannot be discussed without touching a concept that originated with the Romans. Instead of blindly celebrating these revelations let’s critique them. A complete reexamination of this field of study is imperative if Classics is to survive into the future. We are at a crossroads as a country. We can use 2020 as a jumping point for progressive ideals that protect all of our citizens instead of just the rich. Classics remains an incredibly important field of study, but it should be used as a cautionary tale for our country instead of an ideal for us to reach.

Works Cited

Full Text: Bush’s Speech | US News | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/18/usa.iraq. Accessed 6 Nov. 2020.

This is the record of George W. Bush’s famous speech in which he announced the United States government was going to invade Iraq.

Riggsby, Andrew M.. Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words, University of Texas Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/lib/claremont/detail.action?docID=3443185.

This book gives a fairly detailed account of how the Romans viewed the Gauls before Caesar’s invasion. It also explores Caesar’s tactics in Gaul and how brutal they really were.

Summer 2007, Adrian Goldsworthy. “Julius Caesar’s Triumph in Gaul.” HistoryNet, 17 May 2007, https://www.historynet.com/julius-caesars-triumph-in-gaul.htm.

This article is some background information on Caesar’s war in Gaul and the struggles he faced. The author also cautions against comparing Gaul and Iraq which I clearly did not listen to.

43

Male Prostitution in Ancient Rome: The Tangled Narratives of Material Culture

by Greyson Gove

I. Introduction

This project deals with the topic of male prostitution in ancient Rome, and the tangled narratives, biases, and scholarly practices which surround its study. Researchers in classics and other fields may approach the topic for a variety of reasons — queer and women’s studies scholars may examine prostitution as a lens for Roman sexuality or gender inequality, while the more normative and prevalent cisgender heterosexual males in the field may study the topic for (supposedly) purely economic or historical reasons. Whatever the impetus behind its study, prostitution, and specifically male prostitution, exists at a complex and interesting crux of scholarly and personal biases. The project of this paper is, among other things, to map and attempt to untangle these webs of discourse and ideas. In the long term, this research will tease apart three distinct lenses through which male prostitution is analyzed and interpreted: material culture, language, and “theory.” While this paper deals primarily with the first of these, all three lenses are important in capturing a full picture of the current state of the field.

First, I will provide some context on the nature of these three “lenses,” and my rationale behind dividing them as I have here. Unlike cultural anthropology and sociology, which (despite their own biases) have the luxury of dealing with extant cultures and conducting field research with living people, classics and archaeology are by nature limited in the information they have access to. As such, classicists have, in my view, three options for collecting data and making their arguments. The first is material culture. Most prevalent in the study of archaeology, this kind of work — studying material remains, artifacts, and ancient art and architecture — gives us access to tangible pieces of the past. The second lens, language, is particularly common when studying cultures like Greece and Rome which left behind an extensive written record. Through translating and analyzing poetry, laws, and other documents from the past, we may find some insight into how they functioned. The final lens, “theory,” is how I label any argument which uses the field itself as evidence. Arguing that a piece of art should be interpreted a certain way because other scholars have interpreted other works similarly, or that a certain modern identity did or did not exist in antiquity: these kinds of claims, in my model, would fall under theory.

Pointing out these lenses and their interactions with each other is by no means novel, but what I would like to emphasize here is that, despite the veneer of objectivity, all three of these lenses are subject to bias and misinterpretation. As I will outline throughout this paper, while a certain artifact or structure may physically exist, the ways material culture is used to enforce an argument or prove a point are very often tenuous at best, and outright misleading at worst. My project here is not to dismantle the field — or, not to dismantle it out of spite, or a kind of skepticism which refuses the value of this type of work. Rather, I would like to examine how, in such a fraught and complicated topic as male prostitution, the narratives around these lenses are not simple. They are convoluted, intertwined, and often betray or hint at a larger scholarly bias. Whether or not my research sheds any light on the actual workings of prostitution in ancient Rome, it is still important to capture the current discourse in all its complexities and implicit and explicit bias.

II. Background and “Theory”

While prostitution is a fairly well-studied topic within the field of classics, with scholars like Thomas A. McGinn publishing multiple books on the topic, male prostitution in particular is somewhat missing from the narrative. On the one hand, scholars take for granted that male prostitutes existed and were even common in ancient Rome — McGinn, in The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World, dives into an explanation of why his focus is female prostitution without feeling the need to first assert that male prostitution existed. On the other, though this very “taking for granted” in some ways contributes to a lack of scholarly attention on the subject. While scholars tend to agree that male prostitution was prevalent in ancient Rome, few actively engage with the subject beyond a footnote. McGinn offers an explanation for his focus on female prostitution in The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: he writes that “the greater share of the evidence” on prostitution concerns women, and that “male prostitution is an important subject nonetheless and thus is deserving of separate treatment” (2). This verbal maneuver, affirming the existence and even importance of a topic before dismissing it as someone else’s problem, raises a question: where is this separate treatment on male prostitution in ancient Rome, and, further, why exactly must the study of classical sex work be separated explicitly by gender?

McGinn does offer some compelling evidence on these points over the course of the text. Some Roman emperors and other officials attempted to explicitly ban male prostitution (97), though this is more true of the Christian era of Rome than its predecessors, and the fact that Roman law at times separated sex work by gender is one argument for separating them in scholarship. Both these explanations, that the evidence is primarily on female sex work or that the topic of male prostitution should be treated as its own study, are all true to a point, but I argue that they ignore the complexities and the societal and theoretical biases around this particular topic. For better for for worse, the subject of male prostitution is inexorably linked to homosexuality. In Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work, a book detailing the history of male sex work from the ancient to the modern world, scholar Trevon D. Logan also asserts that male prostitution clearly existed in cultures like ancient Rome, but, in the same breath, already ties it to homosexuality. In the very first chapter of the book, he writes: “Male sex work as an occupation is as old as its female counterpart . . . . male sex work has always carried the added stigma of homosexuality, causing male sex to be socially distinct from the more widely practiced female sex work” (19).

Many scholars of classical Greece and Rome, McGinn included, seem to dance around the topic of sexuality, referring to male sex work a distinct and different without explaining precisely why. And perhaps these scholars are right to avoid mentioning homosexuality — one of the prevailing notions of Roman sexuality is that it wasn’t about gender, that it was all about penetration, dominance and submission, the active and passive roles taking on more significance than gender. Even if these dominance-submission-obsessed models are completely accurate, though, they fail to represent the way many scholars seem to frame the discussion. Take McGinn’s claim that male sex work should be a distinct and separate topic: if the only thing that matters in Roman sexuality is dominance and penetration, why should this be the case? Male prostitutes often behaved passively, often were penetrated, even occupied lower social classes than their clients. If Rome itself apparently didn’t care about gender in sexual relations, why should we? This is why the quote from Logan, that “male sex work has always carried the added stigma of homosexuality,” rings true to me despite the fact that its historical accuracy is up for debate. Whether or not Roman men were “always” stigmatized for “homosexuality,” the topic of male sex work is. Tacit in McGinn’s focus on female sex work and insistence that male prostitution must be treated separately, carefully, and as its own distinct topic, I see the specter of homosexuality.

This is not to say that I am any more objective than Logan or McGinn. I am far from a neutral party on this topic: as a gay man with an interest in classics and the Greco-Roman world, I have a vested interest in finding representations of queerness in the real and mythological past, in actively queering the narratives around Rome. My positionality makes me quick to push back against the subtle erasure of male sex work and sexuality it McGinn, and to question and poke holes in the dominance-submission model of Roman sexuality; it makes me perhaps more lenient with scholars like Logan who use modern labels and notions of sexuality to describe the distant past. The point here is not that they are biased and I am not, but rather that the bias around this topic has been hidden in layers of jargon and theoretical discourse. The topic of male prostitution is clearly marked as “gay,” as queer, as non-normative because we view it that way in our own society. As I continue to unravel the discourse around this topic, I hope to expose these inconsistencies, and to map the biases and assumptions, conscious or not, which inform the way we discuss sex work and sexuality. Whether we like it or not, sexuality and sex work are linked. In trying to ignore the influence the idea of homosexuality has on our view of male prostitution in Rome, the narrative itself becomes dishonest and incomplete. As I examine the complex and tenuous ways material culture and other more “objective” pieces of evidence are invoked around this topic, these biases and my own positionality are vital to keep in mind.

III. Notes on “Language”

While this paper deals most explicitly with material culture, my overall project is to map the discourse around male prostitution in ancient Rome through all three lenses, and one of these is “language.” Like material culture, language is something that tangibly exists: ancient texts, epic poems, and legal documents from ancient Rome all have words which were written by ancient people. While the words themselves are immutable to a point, the way we interpret them ranges from tenuous to outright biased, especially when dealing with topics like male prostitution and homosexuality wherein scholars and translators may have a vested interest in a certain type of translation. Once again, this is not to say that translation is useless. Far from it — it is one of the most direct and important portals we have into the past. Rather, I would like to examine the way individual words with more literal meanings take on a life of their own within the discourse, and become animated and altered by the scholarly narratives around Roman sexuality.

Homosexuality in particular is a rather convoluted topic when it comes to translation and linguistic evidence. While the prevailing notion in some scholarship is that homosexuality did not exist in ancient Rome, there are nevertheless a constellation of words and labels which are taken to refer to various types of sexually non-normative men. In “Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality,” for instance, James L. Butrica brings up the words cinaedus, concubinus, puerdelicatus, and exoletus — all of which are taken to refer to various kinds of sexually “passive” men who sleep with other men. Even disregarding the accuracy of the various translations of these words, I would like to push back for a moment against the weight we put behind these words at all. Regardless of the historical and textual evidence we have for any given definition of a word, scholars sometimes invoke labels like cinaedus as if they refer to a legible and unchangeable caste of people.

Cinaedus, which Collins Latin Concise Dictionary defines as “sodomite; lewd dancer,” seems to me more a pejorative or descriptor than a concrete social label, but this is not how many scholars treat the word. Take Butrica’s self-described task of “[arguing against the common belief] that the cinaedus cannot be the same as the modern male homosexual because the cinaedus was thought capable of performing cunnilingus” (209) — even the language used here, “the” cinaedus being “capable” of various acts, almost seems to treat the label as a separate caste or species. The word does certainly appear in Latin texts, but compare it for a moment to present-day pejoratives like “nancy boy” or social categories like “twink” within the modern gay male community. These terms do have reliable meanings, and are social labels to some extent, but they describe appearance and perceived behavior, not a distinct caste of men. Speaking of what “the twink is capable of” in the bedroom sounds ludicrous. While these words are certainly not in a one-to-one relationship with those like cinaedus, archaeologists and linguists attempting to reconstruct what the modern gay community looked like with limited textual evidence might treat them as such. Existing translations and analyses of these words may indeed have merit, but constructing monolithic sexual categories — especially categories which are already designed to fit within the existing framework of Roman sexuality as all about dominance and submission — has the potential to cause harm, and to distort the research.

Until now I have examined the linguistic discourse around male homosexuality in ancient Rome from a more general or hypothetical standpoint. Now, I will frame my analysis around a specific word, and one directly related to male prostitution: exoletus. Commonly defined as “older male prostitute,” Butrica devotes considerable time to untangling the word’s etymology in “Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality.” Butrica’s central claim about exoleti is that, rather than being strictly adult male prostitutes, they were “adult sexual partners of adult males” (223) who “have outgrown . . . in theory at least, their sexual attractiveness . . . [but] continue to be sexual partners of men” (225). Butrica bolsters this claim by tracing the word’s usage in existing Latin texts, and examining in each case whether the common understanding of exoletus as “male prostitute” makes sense. In his analysis, only one historical usage of the word undeniably refers to sex workers, and many others — such as the word’s use to describe Ganymede in Prudentius’s telling of the myth of Jupiter and Ganymede (228) — make no sense whatsoever when forced into that definition.

Butrica is not necessarily free from bias or scholarly agenda; “Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality” was published in the Journal of Homosexuality, and he makes clear from the onset of his text that one of his goals is to push back against the notion that various Roman identities like the cinaedus cannot correspond to modern gay men. His positionality does not, however, discredit the careful textual work he does over the course of the paper, nor make the claims of the scholars he critiques any more well-founded. My point is not that Butrica is an unbiased and therefor superior scholar, but that other biases are often presented as unbiased within the discourse. Butrica’s work to trouble and undermine our current understanding of words like exoletus is astute and valuable in particular because the scholarly bias which assumes that Roman sexuality was never based on gender is often taken as objectivity.

Once again, let us turn to McGinn; in The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World, he calls using words like “homosexual” to describe Roman sexuality a “radical constructionist” view, and generally avoids using the term throughout his text (230). One the face of it this is a perfectly reasonable argument to make, especially since it follows from the general model of Roman sexuality as entirely centered on the active-passive dichotomy. This is troubled, however, when we examine the way he talks about opposite-sex relations, referring to them as “heterosexual couples making love” (164) and mentioning “all-heterosexual graffiti” (229). Making a conscious effort to refer to graffiti describing gay sex acts as depicting “same-sex relations” while being perfectly comfortable using the term “heterosexual” and even euphemistically saying straight couples “made love,” to me, betrays a bias. The bias here is simply a more normalized and therefor subtle one: heterosexual is taken as the norm. Rather than avoiding any terms which reference gender preference, McGinn specifically avoids using the term homosexual. This is a pattern in much of the narrative around ancient sexuality — even while insisting that gender and gender preference are not and should not be part of the conversation, the labels of “homosexual” and “gay” are still treated as abnormal exceptions to the heterosexual rule, and straight gender preference is not given the same careful deconstructionist treatment that same-sex historical couples and relations are.

IV. Material Culture and the House of Jupiter and Ganymede

As detailed above, Thomas McGinn falls into some linguistic biases when he approaches translation and terminology like “homosexual” in his study of Rome, but his work is more revealing here as an examination of how material culture is used to provide evidence on male prostitution and sexuality in ancient Rome. Material culture and archaeology in general can be just as deceptively objective as language. On the one hand, the material world does tangibly exist: artifacts found in Pompeii and Rome have a fixed physical existence which we can analyze, and which give us a somewhat concrete portal into the past. On the other hand, though, the interpretation of these artifacts is just as subject to bias as translation and other theoretical work. Especially around subjects such as non-normative sexual behavior and sex work, surviving physical evidence is at times limited, and scholars can and do extrapolate a great deal from a fairly minimal amount of actual material. One interesting example of this concerning male prostitution is McGinn’s analysis of an archaeological site in Pompeii called the House of Jupiter and Ganymede.

McGinn has access to limited material evidence about the House: the archaeological site, like many in Pompeii, has survived, but the main evidence that it may have been a brothel is the presence of sexually explicit graffiti on the outside. Interestingly, and central to the argument McGinn pushes back against, all of this graffiti describes or depicts same-sex relations (229). McGinn’s work in this portion of The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World is generally to identify and map the various brothels in Pompeii (with a near-exclusive focus on female prostitution), and, as such, there are two claims he wants to make about the House of Jupiter and Ganymede: first that it was indeed a brothel, and second that it was most likely a “co-ed” brothel, housing both male and female sex workers despite the skewed nature of the graffiti. In supporting these claims, he calls on both his own interpretation of the graffiti and archaeological work by John R. Clarke, a colleague of his.

The first of these two supporting arguments, i.e. his interpretation of the graffiti, is more hypothetical than anything else. Over the course of the passage, McGinn argues that “the fact that the graffiti refer exclusively to same-sex relations does not inevitably mean women did not sell sex there as well, any more than the presence of all-heterosexual graffiti at a brothel means that male prostitutes did not work there” (229); in other words, if all “heterosexual” graffiti does not rule out the possibility of male sex workers, “same-sex” graffiti does not rule out that of female ones. This claim is complicated by his later assertion that “most of the Pompeiian brothels had only female prostitutes . . . . [and] all-female brothels were the norm elsewhere as well” (229). McGinn’s claim about the House of Jupiter and Ganymede is built off of a conditional — if “heterosexual” graffiti does not rule out the possibility of male sex workers — and his later claims make this conditional uncertain at the very least. Once again, like in his asymmetrical approach to the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” McGinn seems to see no theoretical problem in the prevalence of strictly “heterosexual” brothels, and reserves his skepticism for establishments which may have catered to same-sex tastes.

More tenuous than this, however, is his invocation of John R. Clarke. McGinn describes Clarke as having “withdrawn his identification of [the House] as a hotel for homosexuals, evidently out of concerns grounded in orthodox social constructionism” (229), citing a passage from Clarke’s “Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art.” Examining Clarke’s original text, however, there are two notable discrepancies between his account and McGinn’s. First, Clarke did not describe the establishment as “a hotel for homosexuals,” but rather “a hotel for gay men” (88). While these two wordings are fairly similar in meaning, it is nonetheless interesting that McGinn opted to paraphrase Clarke rather than quote him directly or otherwise use the word “gay.” More pressing, however, is the second difference between the two texts: while McGinn describes Clarke as withdrawing a claim about the House of Jupiter and Ganymede, Clarke does not reference the establishment at any point during his entire article. Rather, Clarke’s argument centers around how to interpret a scene from an archaeological find: namely, a satirical sex scene engraved on an artifact called the Warren cup.

The Warren cup depicts a total of five figures, four involved in sex acts and the fifth acting as (according to Clarke) either a transitional figure, an attendant, or a voyeur. On side A of the cup, two adult men of seemingly equal status make love (in Clarke’s wording); side B depicts the same between a man and a younger boy, and a second boy with a distinctly different appearance is a medial figure who seems to be observing the couple on side A. There are two problems for analysis here: first the depiction of sex between adult men, and second the role of the onlooker boy between the two sides. Clarke puts forward two possible claims as to what exactly these scenes depict. First, he poses that the cup may depict a brothel, with the medial boy figure as a kind of attendant; second he briefly suggests the idea that the scene may depict a kind of “gay hotel.” Along the lines of McGinn, he quickly rejects this second idea, calling it “naively anachronistic” (88), but he notably does not land on a singular interpretation of the cup, instead offering various other scholars’ analyses for the consideration of the reader.

It is possible that Clarke has made comments, either in personal correspondences with McGinn as a colleague or in un-cited works, about the nature of the House of Jupiter and Ganymede, but, whether or not this is the case, McGinn’s entire use of his argument hinges on a citation which has nearly nothing to do with the actual archaeological site at hand. Whether or not the Warren cup depicts a brothel — and this idea is tenuous at best — it is a work of art and likely of satire, and not, as McGinn intentionally or unintentionally implies, a work commenting on the nature of the House. While this particular example is a kind of rabbit-hole into the minutia of archaeological analysis, it is in some ways representative of the role material culture has in any work within the field. There are physical, objective realities involved — the House has well-preserved graffiti, and the Warren cup depicts a clearly visible scene — but this material evidence is interpreted, extrapolated, and even warped to prove a theoretical point. Whether or not McGinn in particular is influenced by scholarly or personal bias, the potential for that bias is there.

V. Conclusion

Over the course of this paper, I have outlined a small subsection of the current academic discourse and scholarly narrative around male prostitution in ancient Rome, and specifically how it relates to and tangles with biases around Roman sexuality. The three lenses I outline — the broader lens of “theory” and the two more specific lenses of language and material culture — are far from the only ways to interface with this topic, but they do cover the majority of the evidence classicists and archaeologists have at their disposal. “Theory” as such is by nature a scholarly framework, and a subjective if well-supported lens for analysis, but my hope is that this paper has demonstrated that the other two lenses are no more objective than theory. As this project continues, I hope to map more of the discourse around male sex work in ancient Rome, and more of the convoluted interactions of theory, tangible evidence, and scholarly and personal bias in the field. Ultimately, many of the questions we have about Roman sexuality and sex work will always go unanswered. Like the illustrations on the Warren cup, there will always be multiple interpretations for anything we find, no matter how tangible, and no matter how concrete the evidence itself is. By examining our own positionality, decentralizing the assumptions framed an objective and unbiased, and paying close attention to the discourse itself, however, we may at least attain a more nuanced perspective.

Works Cited

Butrica, James L. “Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality.” Journal of Homosexuality, no. 49, 2005, pp. 209-69.

Clarke, John R. “Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.c.-A.d. 250.” University of California Press, 1998.

Collins Latin Concise Dictionary. First US edition, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.

Logan, Trevon D. Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

McGinn, Thomas A. The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of Social History and the Brothel. University of Michigan Press, 2004.

44

Re-Imagining the Goddess

by Amelia Hahn

My final project for Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome seeks to re-imagine the idea of the goddess through art. After hearing class feedback and incorporating ideas from many of my peers, I have completed four drawings depicting variations of the ideal goddess. They are all gender neutral/queer, and each represent four different takes on what the ideal deity might be. The first drawing experiments with combining masculine and feminine appearances in God Uses They/ThemPronouns. The second depicts a non-white female-bodied human standing in front of what may be a flower or the sun, their hand outstretched in An Invitation. The third represents the duality of masculine and feminine divine energy, incorporated into one face, their thoughts pouring out in swirls in They Think. In the final drawing, a female-bodied nude deity stands powerfully, with hands on hips and gaze directed upwards in They Stand.

While this project begins to explore the idea of a “perfect deity,” it does not definitively define it or come to one conclusion surrounding what the ideal goddess or deity might look like. In reality, there is no perfect deity. As we began to discuss in class, religion may not be necessary for society at all, and there is no way to truly ensure that all people in the society where an “ideal deity” is worshipped are equally respected. My hope, however, is that these drawings may be empowering and hopeful to viewers who are not used to seeing such humans in this sort of position of power.

I’m very grateful for the input and assistance of Jody and my classmates throughout this process, and I have loved putting these together! This was a wonderful thought experiment for me. I hope you enjoy looking through these.

God Uses They/Them Pronouns

An Invitation

They Think

They Stand

45

Reflections on Academia

by Peeper Hersey-Powers

Content warnings for: discussion of mental health, academic stress, and unhealthy behaviors in academic settings

“Despite the extent to which I try and motivate myself, there are still many instances in which I fail. I choose classes that fascinate me and are within fields of study that I have had the academic freedom to pursue, and I generally just enjoy learning! But sometimes, this isn’t enough. Even my external motivators—the looming possibility of bad grades for late/poor assignments, the need for good grades in order to graduate and find a job—cannot inspire me with enough energy to finish all that I need to do all of the time… When it is common for students to experience burnout, and for the completion of assignments to become a demonstration of willpower rather than willingness, is it a failure of students when they cannot consistently meet the standards of the system? While I still consider myself to be learning and growing in all of my classes (and enjoy them!), I find myself thinking about what I am growing towards.”

My New Year’s Resolution for 2020 was to learn how to “fail better.” I had no idea how many opportunities I’d have to work on that in this chaotic and stressful year… Haha…

My initial ideas of failure were along the lines of “be okay with getting less than an A on an assignment! :)” which—as the year progressed, the pandemic happened, I moved home from France, and I became more burnt-out and stressed from juggling my home responsibilities and work/school—turned into “just turn this assignment in late,” or “what if you just didn’t turn this in?”—which, interestingly, turned into, “what if you went and ate dinner with your family instead of eating while working?” and “this isn’t worth getting stressed over; work until midnight and then just go to bed, please.” I’m not sure how, but I think my goal of “learning to fail” actually became (or maybe was always) to learn to better take care of (and forgive) myself. It is still a work in progress, and I’m kind of in awe that it took a global crisis to learn how to be more gentle with myself, but I’m glad I’m finally making these steps regardless.

“I am constantly torn between needing to succeed and self-care; I want my present to be “a place of meaning,” but my environment keeps telling me that this present moment is only here so that the next one, and the one after that, can arrive (bell hooks, Teaching Community, 165)… However, there are some moments in which I can feel present, and try to stop “postponing being alive to the future” (172). The small communities I find within my friends, and in my tabletop game groups are some of the only grounding aspects of my college career. There is no competition, no fear of failing or conflict, only an excitement to tell a story and see where the narrative takes us. I just wish I could find ways in which to take these feelings with me everywhere, and also not feel guilty for taking the time I need in the present moment…”

Despite the growth I have made this year in trying to take care of myself, I still struggle with making a present a place of meaning, especially right now. I keep thinking to myself, “I just have to take a year off to rest and work and prepare for grad school applications (which is perhaps already a little contradictory and needs to be unpacked),” “I just have to get into and get through grad school,” and most frequently, “one this pandemic is over I can…”

It’s difficult to keep myself in the present when it is so troubling, and so I am trying to forgive myself this struggle for now, especially being separated from many of the people who help ground me.

I hope to learn how to keep myself grounded and present when so much around me is now virtual. I am going to try and reach out to those around me for support when I need it. I am going to keep telling stories with my friends. Many of my communities have been disrupted, but I will find them again. I will hold myself accountable and maintain my support systems and communities throughout my time in graduate school. The work that I want to do and the changes I wish to make cannot happen in isolation.

“We internalize and normalize…  this mind/body split, which does nothing except harm ourselves and continue to perpetuate the idea that it is normal—acceptable or expected, even!—to put ourselves through undue bodily (not eating, sleeping), emotional (repressing emotions as to not cloud our thoughts, increased instability as caused by lack of physical needs being met), and mental (studying for hours without breaks, cramming for tests, etc) stress. While these examples are on the more extreme end, even engaging in less extreme behaviors along these lines fuel the unspoken idea that we are mechanical “seekers after compartmentalized bits of knowledge” (bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 15).”

What is the line between compartmentalizing and repression? I have often found myself overwhelmed this year by a variety of factors, most of which have been out of my control, and although those around me who tell me to “compartmentalize” and “forget, if just for an hour” have always come from a place of well-meaning, it still often leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The mind-body split is one of the things I worry about most in graduate school. Will ignoring my own needs be expected? Unspoken? How can I make sure I best take care of myself and encourage those around me to do the same? How can I look into how my potential graduate schools view student organizing? Is addressing how an institution exploits students just a pipe dream?

No assignment is worth jeopardizing my health. I have done enough harm to my body in my past academic endeavors, and am still recovering in many ways from these destructive patterns of behavior. I will not treat myself like a machine. I will not let others treat me or my peers like machines.

“Although I have even spent a lot of my time in therapy working on mindfulness, I cannot shake the grasp that the educational system has, and continues to, instill within me. As hooks explains, ‘education as we conventionally know it plays a crucial role as the location where students learn to embrace the values that go with the status quo’ (bell hooks, Teaching Community, 166).”

. . .

“LEDA tries to sell the first-generation, low-income college experience as sometimes difficult, but nothing we won’t be prepared for… They help “high-achieving” students while refraining from advocating for the implied “low-achieving” students. The LEDA social media accounts rarely, if at all, use the phrase ‘all students.’ They institutionalize the ‘revolution’ that they persuade us we are a part of, while simultaneously training us to fit in into the structures that continue to marginalize and harm us.”

What does it mean when we write about queerness in Classics? What does it mean to write about queerness if nothing is done with it to help actual, living queer people? What draws me, as a queer classicist, to the field? Why do I want to study queerness/transness in antiquity? How can I plan to help my queer and trans communities while pursuing these studies? How can I make sure my work is meaningful, and not just ticking a box for diversity without being a conduit for growth in the field?

I already struggle with wanting to make myself palatable to the mold of the academy. In other classes (not this one) I often temper my speech. I hesitate to correct people misgendering me. I wonder if I should try to speak, to act, more masculine. I won’t, because I don’t want to, but I always wonder what implications that this will have on my future opportunities.

I am still—and I think rightfully so—skeptical of the potential to make meaningful change within the system; I still want to change students’ lives, and help those like myself, but I worry about the extent to which that will be possible.

I will do my best to make change. I will continue to internalize my thought that if the field of Classics cannot change, I don’t want it to survive.

I will not temper myself. I do not want my future classrooms to promote any status quo as we know it today. I will be critical of my pedagogy and the subject matter that I teach. I will bring humanity to my classes.

46

Juvenal and Roman Heteronormativity

by Sam Hernandez

Masculinity occupies a particularly precarious position in patriarchal society—abiding by its boundaries is often a requisite for fitting in and advancing one’s status. The process of gender reification has generated an entity of masculinity with inherent attributes, and to break from those attributes is to break from masculinity itself, even though there’s nothing inherently masculine or feminine about anything, really. Contemporarily, the ramifications of enforcing masculinity without fully understanding it are plentiful, creating harsh expectations for how people identifying as male should act and exist. As a result, those who refuse to conform are cast out, through derision, exclusion, or even force. For young people struggling to come to grips with their gender identity, masculinity can seem like an especially daunting set of rules to have to abide by, leading them to repress non-conforming aspects of their identity to avoid ridicule. From liking the wrong colors to listening to the wrong music, young people are forced to navigate a seemingly arbitrary set of societal guidelines based on their genitalia, which can cause further anxiety during the already stressful process of adolescence. Even as someone who has felt relatively comfortable with their gender-identity, I’ve had difficulty coming to grips with some aspects of my personality that didn’t conform perfectly to masculine norms. Through taking this course over the fall, and through the process of writing this paper, I hope to explore the construction of masculinity, specifically as it appears in Juvenal’s Satire 2, and develop a more nuanced understanding of how that affects our modern conceptions of gender.

The discussion of sexuality in Ancient Rome requires care to avoid being anachronistic with terminology, as their conception of sexuality differs to some extent from contemporaneous notions of sexual orientation. The term ‘homosexual’ as an adjective, in the strictest sense, merely refers to someone being attracted to members of their own sex. By this definition, there were absolutely Roman men who would qualify as homosexual, as there were plenty of Romans who were attracted exclusively—or nearly exclusively—to other men. However, language inherently entails connotations beyond dictionary definition, and it is here that the difficulty arises. The adjective ‘homosexual’ as it relates to men carries with it a social meaning colored by the modern gay experience, and the socio-historical conditions and events that generate that experience, and the reader’s perception of the term cannot be distilled into its dictionary-defined limits. Moreover, Classics scholar Craig A. Williams explains the difficulty in ascribing either homosexuality or heterosexuality to Roman men in his book Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity In Classical Antiquity, where he notes that while Romans may have had notions that could perhaps be understood as relatively similar to sexualities in the modern conception, they lacked a directly analogous perception of sexuality. Specifically, he points out that Latin words like stuprum, cinaedus, and fellator have no perfect translation to English, and English terms for sexualities—such as heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality—have no Latin parallel either (Williams 1999, 5-6). As a result, these terms can, at best, be used somewhat heuristically, as they are still helpful in describing the sexual attraction of men who are interested in other men.

For Romans, the distinction between femininity and masculinity regarding sexuality had little to do with the gender-identity of the sexual partner and much more to do with the role played in intercourse. Later in his book, Williams specifies that “males who assumed the receptive role in intercourse were understood to have forfeited their masculinity,” and would then be viewed as feminine (Williams 1999, 166). In such a patriarchal culture, losing one’s masculinity could be incredibly damaging to one’s public image as to be a Roman man was to fully embrace one’s masculinity and the perceived virtues that encompasses. The culture of constant warfare, bloodshed, and imperial expansion heavily relied on the constructed masculinity Roman boys were forced into from an early age. Moreover, taking the passive role in sex—those who did so were called pathici—was also seen as demeaning as it was thought to estrange one from their social class. When men are the sole penetrators, and boys, women, and slaves are those subject to penetration, to take the passive role is to go from being a man to being a member of a lower social caste. However, for the penetrator, it did not matter much whether the person they were penetrating was a woman or another man, as they held the dominant position in the relationship either way. Thus, in discussions of Roman sexuality, the specific dynamics of the relationship in question must be examined to determine the interplay between sexuality and masculinity.

In Satire 2, Juvenal provides social commentary on what he sees as the cause behind Rome’s moral decline: the feminization of men and loss of masculinity. He begins by mocking philosophers, who claim to know good morals but play the passive role in sex with other men. On line 10, Juvenal derides those who profess virtue but are penetrated, calling one of them the “most infamous gutter.” Here, he makes clear his position on men who take the traditionally feminine role in intercourse, as he sees it not only as worthy of mockery but also as immoral. To Juvenal, abandoning one’s masculinity is more than a mere choice he disagrees with; rather, it is one of the most shameful things he can think of, and to be feminine while being a philosopher is deeply hypocritical. He also sees the matter as an issue of the spirit, writing that traditionally masculine features like hairy arms and legs suggest a “rugged spirit underneath,” that is betrayed in the next line when he describes how a doctor “cuts swollen hemorrhoids” from the person’s rectum (Juvenal 2020, 39). For Romans, who believed heavily in souls, it would be an especially harsh insult to suggest that one’s spirit was weak or poorly constituted. Moreover, Juvenal targets far more than just pathici, which is demonstrated by the fact that the indicators he sees of a strong spirit are often not present in women or young boys either. Perhaps inadvertently, he reveals the broad disdain heteronormative Roman men had for everyone else in society, especially women. This line of derision also reveals Juvenal’s positionality: rather than attacking power structures from a position of weakness like many other satirists, he merely seeks to reinforce the status quo and present a microcosm of the broader ideas held about masculinity and sexuality. In ridiculing other men, Juvenal still manages to attack women, further enshrining the existing patriarchal norms and cementing masculine supremacy.

Further along in the poem, Juvenal goes so far as to assert that pathici have a disease rather than a mere sexual preference. Citing the way one man walks, as well as his face, Juvenal definitively declares that fate has determined this man’s affliction, which he says makes the man both simple and insane (Juvenal 2020, 40). For a moment, Juvenal almost appears to set aside his mockery in favor of pity, but quickly resumes his disdain by the next line, ensuring his relentless attack on femininity doesn’t stall for long. His theme of disease is present later in the satire as well, when he insults a man he calls Hispo, who is both a pathicus and a fellator—someone who performs oral sex on men. Specifically, he writes that his “diseases make him pale,” insinuating that his sexual behavior likens him to a woman, as Roman women were often paler than men because they stayed inside much of the day (Juvenal 2020, 41). Thus, to Juvenal and those that agree with him, being a pathicus makes one not only feminine behaviorally, but physically as well, through making one more woman-like in appearance. Tellingly, the strongest insult Juvenal has for a man is to equate them to a woman, which has broad implications for the social structure Juvenal endorses and the behavior he sees as morally troubling. Interestingly, there are comparisons to be drawn between Juvenal’s stances in Satire 2 and modern discriminatory ideologies held by bigots. Although he is incredibly harsh in his critique, in some ways it could be argued that Juvenal’s virulently problematic approach to homosexual behavior is still more accepting than many modern-day homophobes. In likening their sexual inclinations to diseases, he implicitly agrees that pathici had no say in creating their preferences, a point many contemporary prejudiced people are unwilling to accept.

Further in his satire, Juvenal tells the story of a man—henceforth referred to as the bride—who weds another man, playing the bridal role in the wedding processions as well as giving a dowry to his fiancé. He seems most upset that the bride at one point held an important religious role that was especially masculine, which he juxtaposes with the “long bridal gown with lace and a veil” the bride now wears (Juvenal 2020, 44). The hypocrisy Juvenal sees demonstrates the role Roman religion played in shaping moral norms. To him, it is bad to be a pathicus, but much, much worse to be a pathicus who claims to uphold the virtues of Roman religion. In contrasting homoerotic sexual behavior and religion, Juvenal creates a dichotomy between the two; that which falls into one category cannot possibly authentically belong to the other as well. In doing so, he also firmly establishes the realm of religion—as well as most other aspects of public life—as the realm of heteronormative, propertied men who entirely conform to masculine expectations. Surprisingly, though, the Roman pantheon is full of strong, powerful female goddesses including Minerva, who had dominion over war, and Juno, who was believed to have immense influence over the fate of the city of Rome. It does not appear, however, that Roman men believed that mortal women deserved the same agency as their deified counterparts and rejected femininity in traditionally masculine religious roles.

The Roman construction of masculinity was deeply tied to the sexual behaviors and desires of men, most specifically whether they were playing the ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ role in intercourse—and as seen with the story of the bride, in the relationship as a whole. Another essential facet of masculinity is its positionality as a social class; to forfeit one’s masculinity is also to forfeit one’s class status above that of women, boys, and slaves, which would be a huge sacrifice in Rome’s strictly stratified society. Crucially, this analysis also has implications for the modern era, as the cultural West sees itself as the spiritual successor of the Roman Empire, from its legal systems to its iconography. In a multitude of ways, masculinity still encompasses the heteronormativity did in Rome, as being attracted to men or dressing in ways that are perceptually feminine often causes men to be cast out or seen as less ‘properly’ masculine. Males that conform to traditionally masculine standards, however, still hold privileged social positions over most other groups in society. Thus, if we seek to dismantle heteronormativity and patriarchal structures, it is imperative to examine their origins in prior societies, as it may offer insight as to how those systems are constructed as well as how they may be deconstructed in the future.

Works Cited

Juvenal. 2020. Gender and Sexuality in Juvenal’s Rome: Satire 2 and Satire 6. Translated by Chiara Sulprizio.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Williams, Craig A. 1999. Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

47

Interviewing a Human Who Carries Multifaceted Baggage from Their Perceived Identity: A Series of Intimate Moments with Elagabalus

by Madison Hesse

“They called him

Big Ass and Shit Face

And told the story from father to son

While the story held up.

And then they forgot him.

Except for some.”

– Frank Manley, Excerpt from his

Poem “Heliogabalus” (1976)

PART ONE: INFORMAL INTRODUCTIONS

Varius Avitus Bassianus (more commonly, Elagabalus),

I was once asked during a college admissions interview which three historical figures I would invite to a dinner party and why. Although a vision of you danced across my mind instantly, I stammered, fumbling over an incoherent explanation of what is so alluring about you. I said that while nearly everyone from my hometown exuded an unspectacular plainness, you possessed something indescribably complex. My fingers fidgeted under the table and I noticed the interviewer’s body language: arms crossed, brows slightly furrowed, eyes squinted in doubt – she knew as well as I did that my lack of eloquence affirmed just how unsatisfied I was with my own answer.

Perhaps part of your allure is in your malleability – in the way the competing ideologies surrounding your aura can coexist and even encourage productive dialogue about inaccurate representation of historical figures. Perhaps my fascination arose from the unsettlingly neutral attitude which I must approach you with. For, as little as I trust the primary sources from historians trained in fabricating myths, the crimes pinned to you consist of serious felonies, from torture to infanticide and rape. They can hardly be handled with a light heart or nonchalance. I promise to take you and all of this baggage seriously, and to devote this space to being human alongside you. That interview may have glossed over you and continued onto my extracurricular activities, but this interview will do no such thing. We will sit here until we have done at least one small piece of meaningful work, whatever that may look like.

But perhaps we should begin with introductions. My name is Madison Hesse, and besides being around the same age as you and staring in awe at the same stars as you do, I believe we have next to nothing in common. I am non-religious, while you act as the devout high priest of the local sun god El’Gabal of Emesa, Syria (Icks 2010, 332). According to modern labels from the United States, I am considered both cis-gendered and heterosexual, while you, speculatively, have struggled with gender dysphoria and sexual identity throughout your short life. (I say ‘speculatively’ because, as we will discuss later, gender and sexuality have been weaponized against you for centuries.) Oh, and I am Caucasian, as is most of the population in my hometown of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. My cultural experiences, I fear, have been so distantly removed from ancient Syrian culture that the first half of our dinner party might consist of becoming accustomed to each other’s equally strange lifestyles. For these reasons, I hardly feel worthy to speak on your behalf, unlike some scholars studying your life have unfortunately done. I recognize that although I have been acquainted with you since I was thirteen, right around the age when you assumed the throne of one of the world’s most grandiose empires, I have no place asserting that I know you enough to defend or vilify your actions. Without the archeological discovery of a lifetime, I may never be able to fully know you. Yet I would like to try over dinner.

Truthfully, however, if I were to ever receive your RSVP for my party, I would panic. Knowing your alleged penchant for murdering fellow dinner guests with either a torrential downpour of rose petals or with a mauling by wild tigers, should I cower in fear waiting for you to ring the doorbell? Or should I prepare for the experience of a lifetime, patiently peeking out of my window until your procession arrives, bearing gifts of exotic wine and trumpeting to announce you in all of your lavish attire, which would most certainly put my thrifted outfit to shame? Or would you arrive like an old friend, effortlessly sharing stories and watching the sunset with me as we, two lost teenagers, giggle over coffee? (Or are you a tea person?) I lament knowing that I will never know you personally in this way, but perhaps this lonesome, one-sided interview will acquaint us slightly better with each other. Through the use of thoughtful yet sympathetic dialogue, I intend to engage with you, Elagabalus, on an intimate level. If Fortuna grants me luck and eloquence, I hope to both achieve a more profound understanding of the relationship between inaccurate historical accounts and the damaging media interpretations created from them, and also to address the removal of personhood which arises when studying perceptions of a figure rather than their humanness.

PART TWO: AN ABSENT DISTINCTION BETWEEN HISTORY AND MYTH

Contemporary scholars, authors, poets, artists, and musicians, as unbiased as they attempt to be, cannot mentally reconstruct your character from any foundation other than the sparse yet theatrical extant documentation of your life. Try as they may, the damnatio memoriae, translated from Latin as a “damnation of memory,” which dishonored rather than entirely destroyed your memory, created a space for ancient historians to fabricate the own outlandish stories which become our first impressions of you. These “notoriously unreliable” sources, most notably Herodian, Cassius Dio, and anonymous author of the Vita Heliogabali, scathingly and hyperbolically attack your character (Icks 2006). Josiah Osgood, in his analysis “Cassius Dio’s Secret History of Elagabalus” (2016, 177) even suggests that the elaborate theatrics of your story comprises “some of Dio’s funniest writing in his whole history.” And yet, despite their obvious sacrifice of truthfulness, these satirical literary constructions are generally adopted as factual. This disturbs me immensely, and I sit here wondering how many more years will pass before the natural instinct in academia shifts from taking ancient authors at face value to critically scrutinizing their motives.

Once we acknowledge that these authors held great contempt for you, we naturally attempt to answer that pressing “why” question. And by “we,” I mean scholars much more knowledgeable than myself who I can only hope to do justice to. Martijn Icks, one of the researchers at the forefront of scholarship concerning you, proposes in his essay “Heliogabalus, a Monster on the Roman Throne” (2006) that you completed “only [one] noteworthy” action during your reign. This action, the one which brought such a loathsome spirit upon your name, was the elevation of the El’Gabal above Jupiter in the Roman Pantheon. Though historians Dio and Herodian most likely misunderstood the cult of El’Gabal entirely, they weaponized it to associate xenophobic sentiment with your name. Josiah Osgood examines another facet of your perceived identity. He suggests that your false legitimization as the proclaimed son of Caracalla destabilized Rome’s wellbeing so much so that it inspired Dio to speak against the power of a dynastic monarchy to collapse the foundations of the Roman government system he was employed by. However, as even Osgood (2016, 182) himself acknowledges, “Elagabalus and [their] backers weren’t up to anything new,” meaning that an unconventional rise to power had been attempted far before 218 AD with varying degrees of success. Some external factor, then, apart from the puppet leadership, opulence, and false legitimization of the Severan dynasty must have produced such vehement hatred for your persona.

Here, I believe Jussi Rantala would chime in with insight into Cassius Dio’s misogynistic and even homophobic personal agenda. In Rantala’s “Ruling in Purple … and Wearing Make-up: Gendered Adventures of Emperor Elagabalus as seen by Cassius Dio and Herodian” (2020, 127), he discusses how Dio and other likeminded Romans would have considered traditional gender roles to occupy an “’unofficial’ entity in all spheres and strata of the Roman Empire.” To Dio, a conservative Roman senator obsessed with the intertwined ideals of masculine virtus and imperium, a young teenager like you, dressed in traditional Syrian silk and accompanied by three powerful women, would have presented an imminent threat to Roman masculinity as he understood it. In his seething descriptions of your folly, you supposedly dance like a feeble woman and disguise yourself as a female sex worker to initiate intercourse with men, all while your stereotypically treacherous aunt Julia Mamaea guides the political sphere. This feminization of you coupled with a masculinization of the dominant women in your life, Rantala argues, demonstrates just how uncomfortable Dio was in a society straying from a traditional socio-sexual- political hierarchy. In fact, Dio lampooned Nero in the same way, assigning him feminine characteristics as a means of disrespect (Rantala 2020, 126). Clearly his prejudices shine in his writings, allowing us to assume that the majority of your legacy is glorified gossip. And as we are all too familiar with in the 21st century, gossip usually stems from the deep-rooted fears and insecurities of the one spreading it.

So, we know that all the details about your life ought to be taken with quite a few grains of salt. But then, how else can visual and literary artists continue to engrave you into modern memory without the use of these false details? Is there a way to either metaphorically or physically paint an identity of you which suspends belief in any program of how to view you? If not, I wonder if humans will reach a consensus as to whether perpetuating a misrepresentation of historical figures should be praised for benevolent (even if ignorant) intentions, or if ambiguous characters ought to fade into oblivion in the public eye, out of respect to their absent voices. What do you think? Do you care how the world sees you?

PART THREE: HARMFUL REPRESENTATIONS

As it stands now, media interpretations continue to morph the already hyperbolic descriptions of you from the ancient historians into even more fantastical pieces. I fear that although this process goes relatively unnoticed, adding misleading representations to your portfolio will produce a barrier to the unlearning which must be done over the next few decades. Even over the course of this project, I have seen truth starting to drown among an ocean of inaccurate portrayals. Of the ones I have seen, a few stick out as particularly damaging. One, a poem by John Hollander entitled “Heliogabalus” (1967), ends with lines addressing rumors of your gender dysphoria:

“Vainly pretending at

Gynaecological

Problems beneath his Im-

perial drag.”

The word choice here speaks for itself, using only nine words to rashly summarize your gender identity. However, this literary exploration (or should I say exploitation) of your character hardly presents as the most problematic one. “Being an Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabolous,” a 24-panel comic strip completed in 24 hours by renowned artist Neil Gaiman (1991), easily takes the cake there, encapsulating a demonic essence and titling it with your name. I can’t decide whether you might be pleased by or utterly repulsed by the content of this comic, which blindly accepts claims that you murdered dinner guests for entertainment, engaged in human child sacrifice, and even “created possibly the world’s only penocracy:” a government which hires and ranks officials based on the size of their genitalia (Gaiman 1991, 13). These claims show less of an innocent misunderstanding of historical truth than an unquestioning acceptance of ancient historians as infallible. Maybe it doesn’t bother you as much as it bothers me… Or maybe we could fume about it together!

Ironically enough, Gaiman does exclude one crucial aspect of Herodian’s account: your exceptionally Syrian features and oriental opulence. I assume you must have Google Scholar or JSTOR in whatever afterlife you are in, and thus can monitor how your image has repeatedly metamorphosized, so what do you think of this visual representation of yourself? Immediately my attention pulls towards the overtly masculine, European-presenting features of your face scattered across the pages, and I imagine how problematic this might be as a future reference for artists trying to model your hair, nose, or other prominent characteristics. However, these complaints pale in comparison to my horror at the talon-like fingernails, blacked out eyes, and sadistic grin which proceed to transform you into a nightmarish, non-human creature. Even as I approached this artwork with a purposeful intention to respect your humanity, I found myself de-personalizing you more with each passing page. Don’t fret – I snapped out of it.

Disturbed, I then searched for the covers of more professionally published novels which boasted your face on the front covers. Surely after months of writing and researching, they would provide more consistency in illustrating your ethnicity and gender identity, right? Alas, my hopes here were instantly dashed upon viewing the exteriors of the 1966 British First Edition of Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner’s Child of the Sun and the 1973 British Reprint edition of Alfred Duggan’s Family Favorites. The former displays a man roughly in his mid to late twenties who, though he has the full lips and eyebrows which suggest possible Syrian descent, disappears from a viewer’s focus among the tiara, gaudy necklace, earrings, and half dozen rings adorning his body. The latter illustration hardly resembles the same character: it lacks any jewels and undoubtedly conveys the sentiments of both European skin tone and features. Their only similarities, it seems, may be curly hair, effeminate hand gestures, and inappropriately old ages. I wonder if either of the depictions please you. Would you hang either on the halls of your palace as self-portraits, or do you weep in shame at the blatant misrepresentations of your identity?

If you would weep, it begs the question what we ought to do when misrepresentations of a historical figure cause so much confusion that the person loses their personhood in readers’ eyes. We sacrifice historical accuracy so that Duggan could “render Elagabalus inoffensive to mid-twentieth-century ideals of manhood” (Nugent 2009, 173). We sacrifice truth so that Onstott and Horner could celebrate the emperor’s supposed muliebrity and thus “reinforce the cultural category of the mincing, whoring, queer” in their homoerotic and vividly pornographic novel (Nugent 2009, 178). We become witnesses to white male authors shaping history to serve their agendas. Does this surprise us? No. Do either of these literary projects constitute proper reasoning to do this much injustice to the visual depiction of an oriental teenager whose supposed effeminacy was at best an elaborate projection by a spiteful Cassius Dio? It seems to me as though Dio projected enough confusion onto the discussion of your gender, femininity, and masculinity without these authors perpetuating your reputation as “a dangerous, degenerate ‘other’… a feminine easterner” (Rantala 2020, 123). These novels which remove humanity from history for purely monetary gain inevitably produce consequences across Classics as an entire discipline. But the damage has been done. You have been perceived in this way by thousands of people, 14 year old me being one of them.

PART FOUR: LACK OF HUMANITY

You have never been human for me, though I thought I had been studying you intimately for years. This might sound exceptionally strange, but for five years, I was a member of an organization, the National Junior Classical League, which fosters intellectual competition among thousands of young students on (mostly useless) trivia from the ancient world. And I loved it. Stay with me here. Your birthday, your legacy, and yes, details of your whitewashed and effeminate portraits are acknowledged by this community as facts to be memorized and recalled. They are so black and white, so certain, so undisputable that we could anticipate and answer questions about your life in fractions of a second. At least 90% of the high school students I studied and competed against would affirm the years of your reign in the same breath that they would affirm that you brutally sacrificed children or requested gender reassignment surgery. They were facts to us, and we were simply instructed to compile every shred of a fact we could locate, making flashcards and proceeding onwards without second thoughts. So, imagine my disappointment at now realizing that this organization prides itself in how it trains students to memorize rather than analyze – to take the ancient historians as irrefutable, all for the sake of competition. Can you believe that? Do you think an ancient philosopher would be nauseous at the notion that robotic performance in competition would one day represent more success than critical analysis or productive dialogue? It not only damages a student’s mindset as they enter college unaccustomed to questioning the sources provided to them, but it also perpetuates the acceptability of willful ignorance among older Classicists who refuse to see faults in their ancient heroes.

These adults, my Latin coaches included, seem to have conveniently forgotten that neither Cassius Dio, Herodian, nor the anonymous author of the Vita Heliogabali witnessed your reign or had any incentive to speak an unbiased truth. They seem to have forgotten that authors achieved fame, status, honor, and imperial protection by criticizing perceived enemies of the Empire in outlandishly dramatic and nationalistic ways. Instead, these educators attempt to reconcile your bountiful reputations as cruel monster, revolutionary leader, homoerotic queer icon, devout priest, and teenager into one identity so crowded that no space remains for your humanity. Not surprisingly, this effort, destined to fail, results in adults so uncomfortable in discussing your identity that they blush when they must teach it and hush students who begin classroom dialogue about crossdressing or Syrian stereotypes. For teachers accustomed to lecturing on unproblematic grammar constructions and undisputable temple inscriptions, I can understand why they felt too intimidated to explain such a complex being as you. I can simultaneously lament that thousands of children who naively trust that they are on the path to intersectional scholarship of classical antiquity subconsciously learn and practice the othering of you into a non-human existence as a result.

I am deeply sorry that I allowed myself to see you as other than human. Regardless of my training, I feel a chest-burning shame for not realizing sooner that my first question upon reading something like your alleged quotation,

“μή με λέγε κύριον· ἐγὼ γὰρ κυρία εἰμί.”

Do not call me Lord, for I am a Lady

should have been about the sexual politics of assigning a feminine identity to someone satirically (Dio 1914, 469). Instead, my first thoughts were about which flashcard pile to add this quote to so that I would be sure to remember it by the next tournament. From here onward, I intend to remain entirely skeptical, holding just as much faith that you might be a terrified and confused teenager than that you might be the demon and sexual deviant which Cassius Dio portrayed. If only I could prepare a feast fit for an emperor and invite you over for a few hours of conversation…

PART FIVE:  DINNER PARTY QUESTIONS

Maybe this historical nonsense bores the hell out of you, and you would prefer to gossip about love, cults, or the 21st century with me. Or maybe you can hardly wait for me to stop talking, because the afterlife has a game of shuffleboard scheduled in fifteen minutes. I promise I would never jeopardize shuffleboard time, but before you go, may I ask you my most burning question?

I know it sounds terribly silly, but I wonder about your potential relationship with the chariot boy Hierocles far more than is probably relevant to my scholarship. Did Dio invent the entire romance, only pretending that it blossomed after your experimentation with four female wives and as a sex worker to gain homoerotic experience with men? Dio ceaselessly attacks you for acting passively, as a women would, going so far as to describe a roleplay in which Hierocles catches you being unfaithful and subsequently beats you to a pulp. He even asserts that you requested an ancient form of gender reassignment surgery in order to surgically create a vagina for intercourse (Dio 1914, 471).

“Ἄβιτος, ὥς φησι Δίων, τὸν ἰατρὸν ἠντιβόλει διφυῆ αὐτὸν διὰ τομῆς ἐμπροσθίου τῇ τέχνῃ ποιεῖσθαι.”

Avitus, according to Dio, besought his physician to employ his skill to make him bisexual by means of an anterior incision

Does Dio know anything about your love, or even care to recognize your relationship as valid in any capacity beyond the moral degradation he could accomplish through the weaponization of gender? Maybe you could never answer that question, but I do have a few that you could. For starters, was it true love with Hierocles? Do you believe in soulmates; do you believe he is yours? From one teenager to another, do you have any advice on young love, or heartbreak perhaps?

Trust me, I understand how unreliable of a source you are, and have not forgotten your violent, psychotic reputation when I pose these questions. Regardless, my mind wants to know if you experienced real love before you died. I wonder if you danced under the stars with your first love as I did with mine; or if the tension from being a priest emperor with unfathomable responsibility applied pressure onto your relationships; or if you wrote profound poetry which only your lover’s eyes beheld before history erased it; or if you ever planned out the rest of your lives together. I want to know your love story, if there is one to know.

I also want to know your wildest dreams. Your favorite smells. The thing you regret most. What you would do with one more day on Earth. If dying scared you. If you could only be one animal for the rest of your life or only eat one food for eternity, what you would pick and why. All the silly ice breakers that I know I will never know. And though unlikely, I will cling to the hope that an archeologist may stumble across a primary source, maybe from your own handwriting, which would lift the veil of uncertainty around your identity and give you a voice once again. An entire community of scholars waits patiently for this day, and you can rest knowing that your legacy remains sacred to us. You, even from the grave, have intimately touched my life. Thank you for the role you played in sculpting the lens through which I study the ancient world, and for speaking with me today despite your extremely busy schedule.

Requiescat in pace,

May [they] rest in peace,

Madison Hesse

Bibliography

Cassius Dio Cocceianus. 1914. Dio’s Roman History. Translated by Earnest Cary and Herbert

Baldwin Foster. Loeb Classical Library, 32, 37, 53, 66, 82, 83, 175-176. London: W. Heinemann.

Duggan, Alfred Leon. 1973. Family Favourites. London: P. Davies.

Gaiman, Neil. “Being an Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabolous.” Comic strip. The Dreaming, 2008. https://thedreaming.moteofdust.com/2008/07/10/being-an-account-of-the-life-and-death-of-the-emperor-heliogabolous/.

Herodian, and C. R Whittaker. 1969. Herodian. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Hollander, John. “Heliogabalus.” In Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Icks, Martijn. “Empire Of The Sun? Civic Responses To The Rise And Fall Of Sol Elagabal In The

Roman Empire.” Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Heidelberg, July 5-7, 2007), 2009, 111–20. doi:10.1163/EJ.9789004174818.I-380.25.

Icks, Martijn. “From Priest To Emperor To Priest-Emperor: The Failed Legitimation Of

Elagabalus.” Private and Public Lies, 2010, 329–42. doi:10.1163/EJ.9789004187757.I-439.69.

Icks, Martijn, and Sluiter, Ineke. n.d. Essay. In Heliogabalus, a Monster on the Roman Throne: The Literary

Construction of a Bad Emperor, 477–88. https://doi-org.ccl.idm.oclc.org/10.1163/ej.9789004166240.i-516.139.

Lange, Carsten Hjort, and Jesper Majbom Madsen. Cassius Dio : Greek Intellectual and Roman

Politician. Historiography of Rome and Its Empire. Leiden: Brill, 2016. http://search.ebscohost.com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=nlebk&AN=1428723&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Manley, Frank. “Heliogabalus.” Poetry 129, no. 2 (1976): 81-82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20592491.

Nugent, Mark. “From ‘Filthy Catamite’ to ‘Queer Icon’: Elagabalus and the Politics of Sexuality (1960–1975).” Helios 35, no. 2 (2008): 171-196. doi:10.1353/hel.0.0009.

Onstott, Kyle, and Horner, Lance. 1966. Child of the Sun. Greenwich, CT

Rantala, Jussi. “Ruling in Purple … and Wearing Make-up: Gendered Adventures of Emperor

Elagabalus as Seen by Cassius Dio and Herodian.” In Exploring Gender Diversity in the

Ancient World, edited by Surtees Allison and Dyer Jennifer, 118-28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2020. Accessed November 28, 2020. doi:10.3366/j.ctv10kmczg.13.

Being an Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabolous (1991)

Being an Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabolous (1991)

48

For You

by Rowan Hoel

Artistic Intent

This project has been hard to do. It has evolved from several different ideas. It started with the classic essay form, but as I sat down to begin writing it, the form felt wrong. It felt hypocritical to write a paper about how Lucretia wasn’t given a voice from a third person perspective. Similarly, it felt impossible to put another perspective on Harriet Jacobs’ life and experience, as she was a person who lived a real life with real experiences. My next idea was a mindmap, tracing the experiences of the two of these women and incorporating my own experience. When I began to do that, it still didn’t quite fit; I wasn’t sure how to relate my experience to theirs in a productive way. Then I wanted to do a video but was facing similar challenges of positionality and representation. I finally landed on the idea of a collage. Although I’m not an artist by any means, it seemed to allow me to represent all of my thoughts on this project in one place. The sort of hodgepodge form of collage, which would typically feel so unorganized, surprisingly brought a sense of organization and calm. I think the circumstances of this semester definitely led to this project; the chaos it invokes is very indicative of my headspace at this moment in time. I also like that a collage leaves room for different interpretations. I think an important part of this work I am doing in exploring my project is the fact that we will all experience it differently. My intent in this collage may be totally different from the way that someone with a different positionality understands it. It allows for the viewer to see their own experience and tell their own story through their interpretation.

For the collage itself, I started with the idea of objectivity. I have been constantly obsessed with the way that objectivity is given to the straight white male throughout this entire seminar. It seemed to permeate every discussion we had, every piece we read, every unit we explored. I also wanted to relate it to the election in some sense, as I think this election has shown how much trust and faith our society puts into straight white men, which is why I added Trump’s (ew don’t even like typing it) name into my collage. I wanted to juxtapose this inherent objectivity we give to straight white men with Harriet Jacob’s experience. Although she was able to put out a narrative piece on her life, she was forced to continually tell the reader that she was telling the truth. She had to get her piece, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, vouched for by a white person to get published. Even after her constant reassurance (which shouldn’t have been necessary), there were still people who criticized her account and questioned if it was true or sensationalized. Her work is not in the common literary canon, and few people in modernity come into contact with it. It is beyond problematic that society disregards the truth of minorities’ autobiography and awards truth to the third person account, often told through the voice of white straight males.

I wanted to seperate Lucretia from the stories of her in this collage. Although she wasn’t a real person, her position is one that is not uncommon for women throughout history. I wanted to situate her with words such as “for you” “truth” and “voice” to show the agency she should have been given and that all women should be given. I also wanted to include the picture of Lucretia with Sextus Tarquinius on top of her with him crossed out to show who the focal point of Livy’s story should have been: Lucretia and her experience. I continue to wonder how the story would have been different if a woman had written it or if someone in Lucretia’s position had written it. I’m sure it would have been different, which is so important in understanding why the autobiography is so necessary.

I wanted to incorporate newspaper clippings to symbolize how this problem has persisted into modernity. It is frightening and shocking that this issue of objectivity and lack of representation has stemmed from Ancient Rome and continued into our modern epoch. So much so that I still feel the weight of it in this election, in my institution, and in the media. I wanted to include some of Missouri’s electoral map as a representation of politics and the political power that shapes our understanding of truth. I wanted to include a mix of textures and materials also to show the diversity of the issue. I used embroidery floss throughout to show the ways that all of these different people connect through time and space and their continual impact on my life and our society. I also included different colors to show how different aspects of this project make me feel; such as the color red to show my anger and frustration with the way our society functions and runs.

Throughout the collage I also incorporated four little cut outs of a person, which represents me in relation to this project. I wanted to show my own journey as a passive observer and also as an active participant in recognizing and displaying the problems in our accounts of history. The first bust of a person is in the top right corner in blue, which is where I recognized this idea of objectivity I continue talking about. On the left side, there is a second bust in green next to a cut out of Lucretia, symbolizing my role as observer to her story and my wish that she could’ve told her own story in the way that it happened to her. The third one is pink, in the middle next to Harriet Jacobs and the newspaper quote “This is not even a political divide, it’s a reality divide”. This point in my process was all about this discussion of voice and politics, who is missing, who wins, and who loses. My final bust is at the bottom in yellow, with a text bubble of hope next to it. I wanted to incorporate this part to remind myself that this work of unlearning and re-imaging is important and worth doing, and the fact that I have begun to do it gives me hope.

The experience of putting this project together and reading the accounts and narratives of the people who I wrote about was challenging, heartbreaking at times, and rewarding. I know that this is just scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done in this topic, but I am glad and proud that I was able to begin thinking about it. I also want to recognize that unlearning deep white supremacist patriarchcal values is a never ending process and to progress on it throughout this project has left me eager to continue the project of unlearning and reimagining.

49

Constructing Queerness: Pederasty

by Alissa Martinez

I grew up in Central Florida, the middle of nowhere, in a town that hosted two Trump rallies. I’m no stranger to bigotry. I’ve heard every argument there is against queer rights. A point that’s always made is how new and fabricated queer identities seem. People struggle to wrap their heads around queerness because it’s new and other to them. It only makes sense that we started grabbing for roots wherever we could find them, holding up forgotten histories as proof that we have always existed and deserve to exist now. We map ourselves onto the past in the hopes it will validate our present.

The past we most often turn to is the past most revered by our oppressors. We turn to Greece, to Rome. We say, “look, they had gay leaders, and you respect them, so why can’t you respect us?” We tell them about Hadrian turning Antinous into a god. We call it a gay love story, as if making them queer makes us more acceptable. And maybe it does in some ways. It lends us the credibility of the classical world and makes our voices worth listening to in the minds of the powers that be.

Constructing queerness in this way has dangerous consequences, however. It erases important and harmful histories by burying them within queerness. This is the case of pederasty, a Greco-Roman tradition that involved older, aristocratic men undertaking sexual relationships with pubescent boys (12-18). Pederastic relationships were often understood as nurturing, but the sexual aspect cannot be denied, and neither can the inherent power imbalance of these relationships. Yet these points often are erased or otherwise obfuscated. The truth is overshadowed by a deep need to establish queer histories that ‘matter’—that we imagine as being relevant to the present.

Antinous is Hadrian’s ‘favorite.’ He’s never referred to as a boy or child in any discussions of his relationship with Hadrian. His age is hidden or obscured. Even lauded biographies of Hadrian don’t explicitly state the fact that Antinous was approximately 12 when their relationship began (Birley 1997, 158). The entry for Antinous in Encyclopedia Britannica lists him as Hadrian’s, “homosexual lover.” In yet other works, he is described as a, “handsome attendant,” and, “the most famous homosexual in history (Waters 1995, 194).” These academic works frame the relationship between Antinous and Hadrian as akin to modern homosexuality with no mention of its pederastic nature or historical context.

Withholding this information, insisting on the queerness of figures like Antinous and Hadrian, leaves laymen with no understanding of pederasty. This is easily seen in receptions of Antinous and Hadrian. In all of the blogs and articles I’ve read, only two make any mention of pederasty, and one of those treats it as a passing curiosity instead of a fundamental aspect of their relationship (Lynch 2017). Most pieces simply focus on Hadrian’s deification of Antinous and present their relationship as a gay love story for the ages. They were, “banging each other’s brains out from Britain to Byzantium,” and after Antinous drowned in the Nile, “Hadrian’s reaction to the death of his boyfriend was nothing short of absolutely epic (ROMEO 2018).” Antinous is held up as the god of the gays, seen as, “the first and the longest lasting Male supermodel,” and lives on, “in the hearts of homosexual men all over the world, his gentle spirit [ ] rising up from the vineyards (Antinous the God 2002).” The relationship between Hadrian and Antinous is, thus, not only seen as gay, but something to be aspired to.

This deep romanticization of their relationship normalizes pederasty, embedding it into the queer identity. Looking back at pederasty and labelling it ‘queer’ eliminates the distance between the two and creates a space for pederasty in the present. It buries the realities of our changing morals and norms regarding childhood, power, and trauma. It is in this carved out space, absent of true context, that men like Thomas K. Hubbard, Dean Durber, and Bruce Rind craft arguments defending acts of pederasty today. They are able to claim it as queer and separate from our understandings of pedophilia because that is how academics themselves have presented it in their studies of relationships like Hadrian and Antinous’s.

Hubbard is likely the most infamous of these men and was a well-respected classicist until recently, when many of his students exposed the content of his publications and alleged he created an abusive classroom environment. Pederasty has been central to Hubbard’s studies since the beginning of his career, with publications spanning from the 1980s through today. Many of these works have either been scrubbed from the internet or are hidden behind paywalls, and given my reticence to support Hubbard financially, my sources here are limited, but I believe they are still compelling. In his work, Hubbard directly questions modern age of consent laws by examining Greco-Roman pederasty.  He states that, “the Greeks certainly did not buy into the canard that adults always have more power in a relationship with someone younger (128).” Pederastic relationships are understood as essential to the development of queer boys because, “as with most other skills, doesn’t one learn by doing? (132)” There is a consistent emphasis on Greece and Rome as the gold standards of civilization that the West must return to. Hubbard refers to them as, “the historical norms of most advanced societies,” when arguing against age of consent laws as “aberrant suppression of adolescent male sexuality (Hubbard 2010, 148).” Pederasty, to Hubbard, is a tried and true part of social and sexual development for queer boys and is worthy of reinstatement due to its place in Greco-Roman culture.

Many of these points are reiterated by Durber, an independent scholar based in Australia. While Durber claims his main concern is preserving the freedom of academics to discuss controversial topics, he presents many claims about the legitimacy of pederasty today without any examination or critique. When it comes to man/boy relationships (another term for pederastic relationships), Durber states that, “it is it not [his] aim to condemn these unions, bodies, and desires,” because he does not wish to, “participate in this act of oppression (3).” It is through this point of oppression he ties the movement to legitimize modern pederasty to the gay rights movement. He argues that this oppression and the lack of social acceptance for man/boy relationships is the main source of trauma for the boys involved, rather than the relationship dynamic itself. It is, “hid[ing] their desires in the dark,” (Durber n.d., 7) that damages these boys, much like being closeted affects queer folk. Additionally, Durber (2006) explicitly states that, “four decades ago, the homosexual was met with similar political, legal, social, and moral condemnation,” (489) as men participating in pederastic relationships. In this way, Durber deepens the ties between queerness and pederasty that was already established by classicists and capitalized on by Hubbard.

Similarly to Durber, Rind does not claim to be advocating for modern pederasty, but his work and involvement with Hubbard brings this point into question. He presents a historical survey of pederasty in a volume on the subject that was edited by Hubbard. In this piece he states that, “the conclusion [of his work] is not an advocacy for [pederasty] in our society,” (2) yet he still presents many of the same arguments as Hubbard and Durber in his analysis. He reiterates the classical history of pederasty, stating that it, “was viewed as functional, youths’ successful development was attributed to the practice, and men’s disposition for the behavior was considered normal and even noble (1).” Furthermore, he dismisses studies on sexual trauma conducted within in the realm of clinical psychology due its shortcomings as illustrated in, “the case of homosexuality (4).” This is yet another way of tying pederasty to queerness, referencing the fact that homosexuality was a diagnosable psychological condition in America until 1973 (Drescher 2015, 565). The assumption to be drawn here, then, is that theories on the sexual trauma of boys may very well prove to be just as flawed. Rind makes this point to continue his analysis, “without being tied down by the ideological assumptions of sexual victimology,” (Rind 2013, 12) completely dismissing this important context. Excluding this allows Rind to consider the case studies of contemporary pederasty that he presents without addressing concerns involved in our modern cultural understandings of abuse, such as grooming and power imbalance. This excision is purposeful and creates a wider realm of reason for arguments justifying modern pederasty, especially those dependent on tying it to queerness.

The arguments of these men, and others like them, is dependent on the obfuscation of reality. They are predicated on the exclusion, misrepresentation, and undermining of both the historical contexts of pederasty in the classical world and the cultural contexts of modern queerness. These rhetorical strategies were not made up by these men, however—they are rooted in academic moves to ‘queer’ pederasty as discussed with Hadrian and Antinous. Those works were the first to gloss over the legally required power imbalance between Hadrian as an emperor and Antinous as a foreigner (Steintrager 2016, 145). They began the pattern of labelling Greco-Roman pederasty as queer, building the ties modern justificationists expanded. They started the romanticization of these relationships and let it bleed into public receptions. It was queer classicists, desperate for validation and representation in their work, that created the space of reason where these men operate and provided the foundations of their arguments. And it is our responsibility now to address that harm and find a new way forward.

Queer history is important and should continue to be studied and crafted, but that process needs to involve more care. We need to consider why we choose to label certain histories as queer, what we gain from that process, and what we’re possibly losing. In the case of pederasty, we lose far more than we gain in claiming it as queer. We lose almost all historical context in order to make the act of queering more palatable. Instead of queerness providing a deeper analytical lens to the history of pederasty, it narrows the scope of scholarly consideration. It requires us to turn a blind eye to Antinous’s age, to power dynamics, and to shifting norms because looking at those points directly destroys the façade of queerness we’ve built around Hadrian and Antinous and other pederastic relationships.

Whatever queering pederasty has achieved, we don’t need it. We don’t need the justification of pedophilic behavior. We don’t need the discourse of men like Hubbard, Durber, and Rind. We don’t need to erase the boyhood and struggles of Antinous and those like him. And we don’t need validation of our own beings and experiences from our oppressors. The reality of my existence as a queer person, and of all queer people, does not depend on the opinions of anyone, least of all the power structures within the West that glorify the classical world. I’m here, I’m queer, and that is enough.

References

Antinous the God, 2002. http://www.antinopolis.org/god.html.

Birley, Anthony. 1997. Hadrian : The Restless Emperor. Roman Imperial Biographies. London:

Routledge.

Drescher, Jack. 2015. “Out of Dsm: Depathologizing Homosexuality.” Behavioral Sciences 5

(4): 565–75.

Durber, Dean. “Haworth’s End to the Pederasty Debate.” Sexualities 9, no. 4 (October 2006):

487–92.

——— .“The Imagined Dangers of Man-Boy Love” (presentation, unknown conference, n.d.)

Encyclopædia Britannica. n.d. “Antinoüs.” Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. Accessed November

26, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Antinous.

Hubbard, Thomas K. 2010. “”Sexual Consent and the Adolescent Male, or What Can We Learn

from the Greeks?” Thymos 4: 126-48.

Lynch, Patrick. 2017. “How Roman Emperor Hadrian’s Gay Lover Became a God.”

HistoryCollection.com. https://historycollection.com/roman-emperor-hadrians-gay-lover-

became-god/.

Norman, Max. 2019. “The Most Beautiful Boy in the Roman Empire.” Apollo Magazine.

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/the-most-beautiful-boy-in-the-roman-empire/.

Rind, Bruce. 2013. “Pederasty: An Integration of Empirical, Historical, Sociological, Cross-

Cultural, Cross-Species, and Evolutionary Evidence and Perspectives.” In Censoring Sex Research: The Debate Over Male Intergenerational Relations, edited by Thomas K. Hubbard and Beerte C. Verstraete, 1-90. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

ROMEO. 2018. “Gay History: Hadrian and Antinous.”

https://www.planetromeo.com/en/blog/gay-history-hadrian-antinous/.

Steintrager, James A. 2016. The Autonomy of Pleasure : Libertines, License, and Sexual

Revolution. Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts. New York:

Columbia University Press.

Waters, Sarah. 1995. “‘The Most Famous Fairy in History’: Antinous and Homosexual

Fantasy.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (2): 194–230.

50

Silly Queen! You know that doesn’t apply to him: The adventures of a woman in an unfair world

by Camille Molas

There is no question that the ancient world, specifically ancient Rome, produced a culture that still fascinates the modern world. The institution of Classics stands today to analyze and understand the world of the ancients. Their culture created action-driven stories and beautiful narratives that have inspired countless artworks and have helped mold civilizations. However, behind the enthralling words, there are problematic practices and beliefs that, unfortunately, still permeate today’s society.

Double standards, an issue that I have been far too familiar with in my life as a woman, are when one expectation is applied to one group and not the other, even if both groups are essentially equal. Double standards often occur in gender-related issues. For example, when it comes to sexuality, a woman who may have multiple sex partners is deemed “promiscuous”, “skanky”, and frequently labelled as a “whore”. But when a man has the same number of sexual partners, they are actually praised and regarded for displaying their “manliness”. The danger of double standards is how they affect how someone is portrayed and treated. While the double standard concept is considered as a modern school of thought, its practice is not exclusive to modern society. Double standards, especially of women, are ubiquitous in the ancient world and in ancient Rome. In this paper, I aim to analyze how the practice of double standards reveals itself in ancient Rome. I will specifically investigate how women in power are given a double standard by using Dido from Virgil’s Aeneid as the lens.

Virgil’s Aeneid is not a factual historical account of the founding of Rome, instead, it is a book composed of myths narrating the journey of Aeneas and his divine destiny to establish Rome. Nevertheless, it is a useful proxy for how ancient Romans thought and acted in reality. This is because The Aeneid was entertainment, history, and education for the ancient Romans. Virgil’s earlier poetry was taught in Roman schools, even before his death, all the way from the first century to the nineteenth; he was at the very center of European education (Desmond 1994). Essentially, The Aeneid was prime consumption for ancient Romans and the characters were ancient celebrities. To them, the characters Aeneas, Dido, Juno, and Venus were as famous as the Kardashians today. There was really no escape over the inundation of The Aeneid. Ancient Romans were entrenched in the epic story of the Trojan Aeneas. Therefore, the depictions and the treatments of the characters in The Aeneid permeated the ancient Roman culture.

Dido’s character in The Aeneid was pivotal to the founding of Rome, yet also so minuscule for only appearing in Book One and Four out of the twelve books of The Aeneid. But, even with the short number of pages she was included in, she still fell victim to the double standards of ancient Romans. I found that the double standards affecting Dido can be delineated between two categories: power and love. Although, these two different categories are still interrelated and intersect. Dido’s dual role as the Queen of Carthage and Aeneas’ lover was too excessive in the eyes of Virgil, and Dido became the perfect target for Virgil and translators to unleash their prejudice towards women.

Dido is first introduced in The Aeneid by the goddess Venus, who retells Dido’s escape from her murderous brother and the use of her wits to found the land of Carthage. Immediately, Dido is portrayed as a woman who sought liberation and led her people to safety by establishing an entire city. Venus exhibits a tone of respect for Dido’s actions. In line 1.364 of The Aeneid, Venus says,

Dux femina facti

For this analysis, I have read two different translations of The Aeneid, the first from Robert Fagles and the second from the Loeb Classical Library by H.R Fairclough. Robert Fagles translates this Latin to “a woman leads them all” (Virgil, Fagles, and Knox 2006) while Fairclough translates it to “the leader of the enterprise a woman” (Virgil, Fairclough, and Goold 1999). Both translations send the clear message that Dido is a leader for her people. The fact that Venus said this, it makes it even more of an important line since goddesses are not usually fond of mortal women and mortal women can become victims of goddesses (Foley 2005). Dido’s power is also communicated by Venus when she urges her son, Aeneas, to seek Dido for help. Venus is obsessed with protecting Aeneas and by telling her son to receive aid from Dido, this reveals Venus’ conviction on the power that Dido holds. Venus would not send her son to someone she does not believe is capable of actually providing for Aeneas. It’s impressive that in an ancient Roman text, a woman is as powerful as how Dido is depicted. But alas, this characterization of Dido is fleeting. After this brief recognition of Dido’s leadership and power, Venus quickly turns against Dido once Aeneas interacts with her. Now, Dido’s power no longer lies in her intelligence to lead and found a city, instead, her powers are rooted in seduction. Venus now perceives Dido as dangerous and finds her threatening. Venus’s opinion on Dido changed merely because Aeneas was now part of Dido’s life. There were no changes to Dido’s actual power, leadership, or generosity, yet Venus now finds it threatening (instead of helpful as she did earlier) to the extent that she must intervene with Cupid. This is the beginning of the dismal transformation fueled by double standards of how Dido’s character is portrayed.

Since Dido escaped from Tyre after the murder of her husband by her brother, she had managed to build a successful and thriving city called Carthage, specifically without a man by her side. Of course, many suitors have tried asking for her hand in marriage to which she refused profusely, citing her loyalty to her dead husband, Sychaeus. However, when she falls in love with Aeneas (with the help of Cupid), she admits to her sister, Anna, her true feelings. Naturally, her sister is enthusiastic about how Dido feels about a new man but then she states something unsettling,

Quam tu urbem, soror, hanc cernes, quae surgere regna coniugio tali! (4.47-4.48)

Fairclough translates it as “What a city you will see rise here, my sister, what a realm, by reason of such a marriage!” and Fagles as “Think what a city you will see, my sister, what a kingdom rising high if you marry such a man.” Anna emphasizes that through this marriage, Carthage can “rise”. But Carthage is already rising because of Dido’s leadership alone, all built without a man next to her. For some reason though, there exists this belief that by marrying a man, Carthage can automatically become better just because of her new marriage. As a Queen, it isn’t enough for Dido to lead her people to prosperity, instead, there is a default mindset that having a King will make Carthage better off, not necessarily because the man is great, but just merely because there is a man present. While marriages for rulers are expected, it is much more common for King-less Queens to be questioned on their ability to rule rather than the other way around. Dido has clearly taken care of her people and provided for them, yet the marriage of a random Trojan man whom they barely know is the key to making Carthage even better. Dido’s power and her ability to rule is degraded and replaced because now a person with a phallus is available.

The portrayal of Dido’s leadership changes dramatically in Book Four of The Aeneid. As Dido continues to fall in love with Aeneas, she begins to neglect her duties as the leader of Carthage. Important infrastructure projects seize and all work is suspended. However, I argue that this behavior from Dido does not stem from her actual nature but instead from Virgil’s inherent bias toward women. While Dido is widowed, she is capable of being a leader but the moment she falls in love, she is not capable of anything else but loving a man. Dido’s leadership is questioned and even erased because she is now in love, as if it is so impossible to lead and be in love with another person simultaneously. This shows that ancient women are seen as one dimensional, either as a single masculine-like leader or a feminine woman that’s in love, but never as both. The erasure of Dido’s leadership is perpetuated by translators. In line 4.124 and 4.165, Virgil repeats the same phrase to describe Dido and Aeneas,

Dido dux et Troianus

The Latin dux translates to leader, et to and, while Troianus to Trojan. When translated to the same order as the Latin it reads: “Dido leader and Trojan”. Shockingly, professional translators disagree with that translation. Fagles translates it to “Dido and Troy’s commander” and Fairclough to “Dido and the Trojan chief”. The dux magically moves to the other side of the et and gets attached to Troianus. While Virgil may still believe that Dido is a leader, the way he has belittled Dido by portraying her as “tragic” (Virgil, Fagles, and Knox 2006), “lovesick”(Virgil, Fagles, and Knox 2006), and “unhappy” (Virgil, Fairclough, and Goold 1999) has convinced white men translators that this equates to Dido failing to be a leader. It’s important to remember that Dido and Aeneas’ relationship was not unrequited, Aeneas also loved Dido. Yet, we see an opposite portrayal of Aeneas at this time. He is the one who now earns the title of dux and simultaneously strips it from Dido. If Dido truly was distracted from her leadership duties and was the reason she no longer was entitled to “dux”, how come Aeneas is still praised and regarded? He quite literally has twelve books written about all the distractions he faced to achieve his divine destiny. Yet, Dido is the one who is deprived of her title as a leader, even though she has already achieved what Aeneas is trying to do – establish a city. Dido’s leadership is removed from her due to the biases that men have when writing and translating about strong, self-willed, and powerful women.

It’s not a surprise that the ancient Roman world was patriarchal and demanded fidelity from women in marriage, as most cultures still do in modern times. Dido’s strong conviction of loyalty to her dead husband was a crucial characteristic. Ancient Romans expected this devotion of loyalty without any question. The numerous suitors she had were offended at her rejection but nevertheless accepted it because she was insanely devoted to her late husband, which just reinforced ancient Roman values. Ancient Romans’ obsession with chastity and faithfulness can even lead to the death of a woman. Marriage of cum manu meant that the husband possessed full control over the woman, her property and her life (Aneni 2012). Cum manu required such a strong sense of fidelity, that if a woman were unfaithful, her husband could legally kill her (Aneni 2012). But, not to anyone’s surprise, fidelity was not an expectation for both genders equally. Men were not punished when they were unfaithful, certainly not sentenced to death. When Aeneas escapes Troy, his wife, Creusa, is killed in the middle of the chaos. Aeneas tries to look for her but instead her spirit appears to him to describe his future and it includes a “queen to make [his] wife” (Virgil, Fagles, and Knox 2006). This is almost facetious, that the ghost of Aeneas’ late beloved tells him that his life will be amazing without her and that he will have another wife so he should not worry at all. His dead wife is essentially encouraging him to move on and be happy. I believe this specific scene was created in order for ancient Roman men to justify the double standards of fidelity. Since their late wife said it was okay for them to move on, then it is okay. But a late husband would never tell a wife such a thing, therefore women should be expected to remain loyal. Aeneas has the freedom and the approval from his dead wife to be with any woman he could want, while Dido still feels guilty about her new found attraction and desire for Aeneas even though her husband is six feet underground.

Despite Dido’s suitors accepting her rejection, Dido was soon faced with backlash once news of a “marriage” between Dido and Aeneas emerged. Lord Iarbas was appalled that Dido would ever choose Aeneas as a partner over him. Although, this anger did not stem from his feelings of Dido, instead it stemmed from his ego. Iarbas calls the incident a “second Judgment of Paris” (Virgil, Fagles, and Knox 2006). Iarbas’ statement reveals his arrogance and aligns himself with the gods. He does not wish to marry Dido for happiness ever after, but rather for his own gain. It’s interesting that Lord Iarbas allowed Dido to remain unmarried and did not cause quite a stir because of Dido’s loyalty to her dead husband. But when Dido broke that fidelity to be with Aeneas, Lord Iarbas felt it was wrongful and that he had been cheated since he allowed Dido to settle in his land. Lord Iarbas feels a sense of entitlement to Dido for what he did for her and Carthage. Regardless of a woman actually being married cum manu or not, the tone and expectations of women are still instilled within the patriarchs of ancient Rome.

Dido’s transformation from Book One to Book Four of The Aeneid was perpetuated by the double standards of her power and ability to rule as well as her relationships of love and marriage. The double standards that Dido suffered from ultimately led to her own demise. Virgil’s inherent bias against women is revealed in how Dido commits suicide. The abrupt departure of Aeneas causes the mental and emotional breakdown of Dido in Virgil’s eyes. Virgil writes about the “tragic”, “helpless”, and “lovesick” Queen throwing herself into the pyre. To me, Virgil underestimates women and their ability to handle a heartbreak and disappointment. The death of Dido writes itself as an exaggeration of emotions in the eyes of a man. Dido’s world prior to Aeneas was about structure, leadership, and her people. However, Virgil writes about Dido in a way that she becomes tangled and immerse in a world solely based on Aeneas. Virgil is under the assumption that women, even women in power, when in love will focus exclusively on the man, neglecting their life before them. Dido completely becomes unhinged at the news of Aeneas’ departure and ultimately believes that her own people do not want her to rule. The culmination of these overwhelming issues pushes Dido to the edge. Virgil imposes his own double standards onto Dido by having her ultimately kill herself. Dido is just an extension of Virgil’s mind and personality, and his thoughts are that women who are devotedly in love, simply cannot continue their life without the man. However, any man, like Aeneas, can be strong enough to move on regardless of their hardships.

Dido’s character was stripped of her power, not because Dido herself lost it, but because of Virgil’s expectation and how he portrayed her to be. How come Dido is the only one to suffer and lose everything when Aeneas also fell in love? It’s because ancient Roman men are “divinely destined” to do more and accomplish epic tasks. And ancient Roman women are merely there to do a man’s bidding. Dido quite literally accomplished what Aeneas was trying to do- found a city. Yet, Dido was reduced to a “tragic” and “lovesick” Queen while Aeneas gets to continue to be a hero. Dido deserved more than the writings of Virgil. Her strength, leadership, and intelligence that were first introduced in Book One never disappeared from her true characteristics, instead it was engulfed by the double standards of ancient Roman men.  Should Dido be a real person, her actions may not be the same as Virgil writes them out to be. Sadly though, they would likely still be written and translated in the same biased and double standard manner.

While Dido was a fictitious character written from an ancient Roman man’s point of view, an important real-life figure holds similar qualities as her- Cleopatra VII. Both were powerful Queens that were tarnished by double standards. At the culmination of their life, they were both victims of “madness” (Benario 1970). Dido by the madness of a woman in love and Cleopatra by the madness of her actions and her “depraved state of mind” (Benario 1970). Cleopatra being cunning and charming, was vilified as manipulating powerful men in order to gain more power herself. Dido received the same reaction from Venus once Aeneas entered her life. When self-sufficient and powerful women are successful, they are then seen as a threat and accused of using their sexuality as manipulation, as if that’s the only way women can become more powerful. But powerful men are rarely questioned when they achieve the same success. Both Dido and Cleopatra were considered enemies of Rome as they both had illegitimate sexual relationships with critical figures of Rome. This only made them more of a target for impossible double standards as a way to tear them and their legacy down. Their successes were never seen as successes, instead only as threats that were extinguished by degrading their characters and actions through the unachievable double standards that the ancient Romans practiced.

This analysis of double standards was under the lens of ancient times. Nevertheless, I anticipate that readers will still feel a despondent familiarity of the double standards that Dido suffered. The belief that women are beneath men and must adhere to different rules and expectations alters how a person is viewed and characterized, even if that may not be who they truly are. And when they do not conform to the double standards, they are written in history as “tragic” and their story disparaged. While double standards are academically a modern theory, the practice of it stems all the way to ancient time. The Aeneid was the ultimate source of history, entertainment, and education for ancient Romans and they absorbed and practiced these biases that Dido faced. Disappointingly, society has not evolved to the point of eradicating double standards. Even today, translators are still imposing their own prejudice to ancient characters. And we still implement it in modern times such that there are women today who will fall victim of double standards, such as the legendary Dido, Queen of Carthage, did.

51

Finding the “Other” in Classics: Researching the Yoruba Society to Understand Erotic Magic and Ritual in Ancient Rome

by Kate Shimamoto

This paper is largely inspired by Shelley Haley’s “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-Membering, Re-Claiming, Re-Empowering” where she analyzes the ancient world through an afrocentric feminist viewpoint. Haley’s work is revolutionizing how we approach and study antiquity, and I hope this paper helps honor the powerful impact she has made on Classics.

Introduction

Classics, by definition, establishes an “other” as it divides the Ancient Greco-Roman world from the rest of the Mediterranean. Even though Ancient Rome was comprised of many diverse cultures, the majority of classical scholarship and curricula only focuses on Ancient Greece and Rome. Through the disregard of non-Greco-Roman civilizations, the way we study Classics preserves the same exclusionary and xenophobic attitudes that the Romans held towards foreign societies. However, how much more could we understand about Rome by researching and contrasting previously disregarded “other” societies of the Mediterranean?

This project is a comparative study between Ancient Rome and Yoruba that analyzes the gendering of erotic magic in antiquity. As seen in both cultures, magic was mainly associated with women in literature even though it was practiced by all people, regardless of class or gender. Using an afrocentric feminist approach, this type of research contextualizes Rome within the broader cultural world of the Mediterranean to better understand how magic was perceived in the Roman society.

Magic in Antiquity

Magic was ubiquitous throughout the Ancient Mediterranean and was an important aspect in the spiritual lives of the ancient people. In particular, erotic sorcery was a popular form of magic practiced by people of all classes and genders. Erotic magic was most commonly used to inflict sexual longing or attraction in a subject, confine a subject to celibacy or fidelity, or induce or treat impotence and infertility. This magic existed in many forms, including potions, binding spells, lead curse tablets, and Kolossoi voodoo figurines.

The Greek Magical Papyri is one of the largest surviving collections of spells, hymns, and rituals that gives scholars insight into these erotic magical practices. Discovered in Egypt, these papyrus texts detail specific instructions and formulas to perform sex magic. Translated below is an example of a typical agoge binding spell from the Papyri.

Agoge VI: […] Let her not be able to sleep for the entire night, but lead her until she comes to his feet, loving him with a frenzied love, with affection and with sexual intercourse. For I have bound her brain and hands and viscera and genitals and heart for the love of me^1

Agoge VI is a spell that was performed by men to inflict eros on a female subject. In addition to incanting the words, this agoge instructs the male to have a Kolossoi doll of the subject to further strengthen the binding. The majority of spells found in The Greek Magical Papyri describe magic being performed by a male in a similar structure as Agoge VI. However, several spells exist that either do not specify the gender of the caster or were written for females specifically. Agoge IV is an example of a binding spell that would have been performed by either a male or a female.

Agoge IV: Take a shell from the sea and draw on it with myrrh ink the figure of Typhon given below, and in a circle write his names, and throw it into the heating chamber of a bath. But when you throw it, keep reciting these words engraved in a circle 2

Gendering of Magic in Roman Literature

While material records indicate that magic was used mostly by men, Roman literature portrays women as the main practitioners of sex magic. Oftentimes these women were depicted as using magic in manipulative and controlling ways. One example of this can be seen in book III of Ovid’s Amores, as he blames his impotence on the witchcraft of a vengeful woman:

Was I the wretched victim of charms and herbs, or did a witch curse my name upon a red wax image and stick fine pins into the middle of the liver? […] What prevents the cessation of my energy being due to magical practices? It is perhaps from that source that my powers became inadequate. Shame also played a part, for my very shame at what happened inhibited me. 3

Here, a female witch is accused of using magic to take away Ovid’s manhood, undermining his power and identity as a male. In a symbolic sense, this magical ability of women threatens Rome’s patriarchal society and the domination of the phallus. This passage would elicit great fear in any Roman man reading this, perpetuating the negative association of women and magic.

In addition, unlike male casters of magic, females were lumped under the monolithic label, “witch”. Similar to how the names of women like Dido and Cleopatra are rarely mentioned in ancient literature, the name witch takes away the identity and individuality of women spell casters by reducing them to a group. In addition, the label witch allowed for generalizations to be made, as witches were often stereotyped as dangerous and untrustworthy old hags. This characterization was likely reflective of the fear surrounding females having power from magic. Female prostitutes were also often generalized as witches due to their ability in seducing others. In a conversation between Glycera and Thais from Dialogues of the Courtesans, Glycera explains how Gorgonia’s mother brewed pharmaka to help Gorgonia seduce a male client, stating

Why, Thais, you don’t think the Acarnanian has fallen for her beauty? Don’t you know that her mother, Chrysarium, is a witch who knows Thessalian spells, and can bring the moon down? Why, they say she even flies of a night. She’s the one who’s sent the fellow out of his senses by giving him a drink of her brew, and now they’re making a fine harvest out of him.4

Even though Gorgonia was balding and not very attractive, the magic potion still encaptured the desire of the client. Again, we can see discomfort in the text due to the power Gorgonia holds. Her seductiveness is therefore blamed on her manipulation and trickery of the client through using sex magic. Since prostitutes threatened theself-control of others (namely males) as seen with the client, they were associated with sex magic and witches.

Lastly, even the Greek language is structured to associate magic with women. The Ancient Romans believed that magic was carried out by spirits called Daimones. In many texts, Daimones is written to be read as a female noun, emphasizing that the supernatural biddings are done by females. In addition, the word Pharmakis, which is used to refer to women, can also be interchanged to mean drugs and incantations.

Magic and its Perception in Yoruba

The practice of magic and ritual were main centerpieces in the spiritual and religious beliefs of the Ancient Youruba people. Magic was closely tied with the Yoruba deity Oshun, who was also the goddess of love, fertility, pregnancy, romance, marriage, and healing. These spells often called on the goddess to promote fertility or to help with medicinal rituals and healing. In Yoruba society, there was a clear differentiation between gender roles; women’s greatest authority came from their role as a mother and the caretaking of others. Like Ancient Rome, there is a similar association of magic with females and feminine gender roles.4 Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans ed. and trans. M. D. Macleod, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936-1967) pp. 358.

However, when magic was linked with the deity Ifá, the Yoruba god of divination, magic rituals were often used to control and restrain women. One type of magic practice is mágùn, which directly translates to “do not mount/fuck”. Records from Yoruba herbalists that practiced mágùn indicate that men secretly gave women this drug to control their virginity outside of marriage or to stop infidelity within marriage. If a female is infected with mágùn and breaks these constraints, she would break out in boils, pox, and other illnesses within seven days and would sometimes even die. In addition, if the female committed adultery with a male lover, the penis of the love affair was believed to become stuck and cause severe pain until the husband cancelled the spell. Through the occult of mágùn, males had control over a female’s body.

Compared to its actual practice, mágùn was portrayed vastly different in stories. Written below is an account that describes the affair between a wife unknowingly under this curse and her paramour.

At around 9 a.m., Mr. Akínléye dropped by to see his girlfriend. After greeting the people in the house, the woman welcomed him into her room. Thus Mr. Akínléye entered the trap that ended his life. He somersaulted three times and was gone to the home of no return. When the police came to investigate the incident they were surprised to see the condition of Akínléye’s trousers, and also of his penis, which had remained erect.5

Contradictory to how mágùn was actually experienced, this story portrays the male lover as the victim even though the curse was placed on the wife. Mr. Akinléye’s death redirects the blame from the husband (who laid the curse) to the wife herself, essentially condemning the wife for her own subjugation. This mirrors how Ancient Roman literature also skewed the narrative of erotic magic as a predominantly female practice used to manipulate others. Both portrayals employ gender inversion by describing women as the ones with threatening power and agency over men; this false narrative was then used to justify mágùn and the ostracism of witchcraft, reinforcing the systems that take away female agency in the first place.

In comparing how erotic magic in Yoruba and Rome was portrayed, I found that many of these connections reveal underlying dynamics of the societies themselves. In Yoruba, magic was primarily centered around marriage, chastity, and healing. As Shelley Haley articulates in “Be Not Afraid of the Dark”6, marriage was a societal expectation as motherhood was highly valued in Yoruba culture. Mágùn manifested out of a fear of women finding power outside of motherhood, breaking the system of marriage that placed women in a role of dependency to have value. In contrast, Roman magic often portrayed women as tricksters who used magic to emasculate or gain power over men. This narrative reflects the underlying fear of women gaining power in Ancient Rome and its threat to the patriarchal dominance of the phallus. Thus, this type of literature was a response to the tension that would have existed in society to restrain women. Ultimately, the portrayal of magic in both Yoruba and Rome reflect the fear of female agency and the deconstruction of ingrained systems from women getting power.

Reflection Analyzing the Yoruba and Roman worlds from an afrocentric, feminist viewpoint has been some of the most meaningful research I have ever done, and will forever change how I approach Classics. However, this project was also an experience in itself trying to navigate the great lack of resources/scholarship to compare Yoruba and Ancient Rome. Beyond Shelley Haley’s work, there is very little scholarship that compares Yoruba with Rome (or any African/Near-Eastern civilization for that matter) from an afrocentric viewpoint and nothing in the context of magic. Because there is no secondary scholarship to build upon, this research felt overwhelming at times as there is so much unexplored information. This also required lots of time to be dedicated towards sifting through primary sources and completely drawing my own conclusions, which can be intimidating. In the secondary sources I did read, it was challenging to see beyond the western slant and to differentiate bias from actual information. I recognize that my own work still reflects these types of biases, but I hope that continuing to grow my understanding of African civilizations will make seeing through this bias easier.

To be completely honest, I had no idea where this project was going to go or what connections I would find, if any. However, even in the relatively small amount of research, there were many powerful and insightful conclusions that help better understand both Yoruba and Roman society. It is astounding to imagine how much we could learn about the Ancient world if this type of scholarship was practiced throughout the field. As a young Classicist, it is inspiring to see how much incredibly meaningful work there is left to uncover. I hope that someday this kind of cross-cultural work will be a regular part of Classical curricula to more holistically and responsibly understand the Ancient Mediterranean world.

1 Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) PGM 4.296-466.

2 Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) PGM 7.467-77.

3 Ovid. Heroides. Amores. Translated by Grant Showerman. Revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 41. (Harvard University Press, 1914) pp. 476.

4 Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans ed. and trans. M. D. Macleod, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936-1967) pp. 358.

5 Schiltz, M. A YORUBA TALE OF MARRIAGE, MAGIC, MISOGYNY AND LOVE. (Journal of Religion in Africa, 2002) 32(3), pp. 335–365.

6 Haley, Shelley Be Not Afraid of the Dark: Critical Race Theory and Classical Studies. (Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies, 2009) pp 27-50.

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Workshops

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Workshop 1

WORKSHOP ONE 8/24/20

General Instructions:

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Select a person to be the timekeeper.  This person should keep the group moving along according to the time allotments on the worksheet.  This job is crucial, since without it, the group will not complete the experience which the worksheet is designed to bring about.

This workshop has four parts and is designed for 1 hour and 45 minutes.  There is a 15-minute break and a 15-minute moveable part, which will allow time for the faculty to pop in for a chat.  Please note your start time and end time before beginning.

Although we must use the internet in order to meet, please refrain from using a search engine (e.g. Google) to look up answers to questions.  If a question arises during discussion that you cannot answer without external research, please bring your question back to the seminar for discussion and/or use it as a writing prompt and do your research outside of class.

You will need paper and something to write with for at least one part of this workshop; I recommend making notes — either on a printed copy of this workshop or on your own paper — throughout.

Part I: Introductions (30 minutes)

1. (5 minutes) Please begin by appointing a timekeeper and introducing yourselves.

2. (15 minutes) Working independently, thoroughly review the “Course Information,” “Schedule,” “Communiqué,” and “Resources” pages of the course website at https://romasexualis2020.wordpress.com.  Read the “Student Contract.”  Note any questions.  Begin to think about your responses for your “Student Contract.”

3. (10 minutes) Briefly discuss your interests and aims in this course. What brings each of you to this course?  What are your aims for yourselves this semester?  Discuss any questions you have about the Website, Course Information, and initial Schedule details, etc.

4. (5 minutes). Please develop a response to the requirements and first assignments, noting any questions, concerns, worries, problems, elements that you feel enthusiastic about, etc. You will be asked to report your conclusions.

Part II.  Break (15 minutes)

Part III.  Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Rome (45 minutes)

This course centers topics at once familiar and difficult to pin down.  Please take some time to think about – and discuss – the organizing themes of the course.

1. (10 minutes) What do the terms “gender” and “sexuality” mean? Can you define these words? How have you developed your current understanding of these concepts?  What influences and/or experiences have shaped how you think about these terms?

2. (10 minutes) What is “Ancient Rome”? What do you know about it? What images, connotations, or associations do you have with the idea of ancient Rome?  Where, primarily, do you suppose your ideas about Ancient Rome have come from?  If you have learned about Ancient Rome in a school setting, see if you can think of what ideas about Ancient Rome you’ve encountered outside of the academy.

3. (10 minutes In addition to gender and sexuality, we will also be centering themes of race, ethnicity, social status, and class. Why do you think it is important for us to also consider these vectors of subjectivity in connection with gender and sexuality?

4. (15 minutes) The people and culture of Ancient Rome are not the only focus of this course; we each bring our own subjectivitity and positionality to our scholarly work, and self-reflection will be an important part of what we do. For this part of the workshop, please take five minutes to journal to yourself and then reconvene with your small group and discuss how your positionality as individuals has informed the perspective you bring to our inquiry.

Please look back at your notes from Part One, question 3.  How have race, class, gender, sexuality, social status, and other subjectivities (taken together, your positionality) shaped the interests that brought you to this course?  What advantages helped you arrive here?  What obstacles have you overcome to be here today?  What are your aims for this class?  Why will being self-reflective be important in helping you work toward those aims?

Part Four: Moveable Chat (15 Minutes)

At some point during the workshop time, Jody will pop in for a 15-minute chat.

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Workshop 2

WORKSHOP TWO 9/1/20: INTRODUCTIONS & INTERSECTIONS

General Instructions:

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Select a person to be the timekeeper.  This person should keep the group moving along according to the time allotments on the worksheet.  This job is crucial, since without it, the group will not complete the experience which the worksheet is designed to bring about.  Please select a volunteer reporter.  Everyone should make notes of their own reflections.  The reporter’s job is to record the group’s conclusions and report these out.

This workshop has four parts and is designed for 2 hours and 15 minutes.  There is a 10-minute break in the middle and a 15-minute moveable part scheduled in, which will allow time for the faculty to pop in for a chat.  Please note the Start Time: _________ and End Time:__________ before beginning.

Although we must use the internet in order to meet, please refrain from using a search engine (e.g. Google) to look up answers to questions.  If a question arises during discussion that you cannot answer without external research, please bring your question back to the seminar for discussion and/or use it as a writing prompt and do your research outside of class.

Part 0: Moveable Part (15 Minutes) Jody will pop in for a 15-minute visit.

Part I: Ortner (35 minutes)

1. (15 minutes) Please work together with your group to define the following terms and to describe how they are used in the Ortner. Note if you struggle to understand any of these terms.

1. Female

2. male

3. nature

4. culture

5. ritual

2. (20 minutes) Work together with your group to answer the following questions about the Ortner essay. Please stay close to the text and refer to it often!  Aim to reach consensus on a single answer to each question.  Dissenting views, questions, and confusions will also be vital in our follow-up discussion, so – as the reporter — please note these as well.

- (a) Ortner argues that societies universally view women’s physiology as closer to nature than men’s for several reasons. Work together (1) to make a list of three of de Beauvoir’s notes about female physiology — as recapitulated by Ortner [1974, 74-75]) — and (2) to restate, in your own words, why woman is seen as closer to nature than man.  Do you agree that women are seen as closer to nature than men in our society?  Can you think of exceptions?  Please note that Ortner is not arguing that female actually is to nature as male is to culture, but rather reporting her research that all societies hold this belief.

- (b) How, on the other hand, does Ortner explain the idea that men are viewed as closer to culture than women? Do agree that our society believes that men have a close connection to culture whereas women do not?  Can you think of any exceptions?

- (c) Ortner argues that rituals provide evidence for the fact that society privileges (male-coded) culture over (female-coded) nature. Review her argument on pp. 72 – 73 and come up with an example of a ritual that works in the way Ortner describes. Think individually for a moment, and then discuss as a group.

- (d) Ortner recognizing only male and female, with no consideration of non-binary genders, a gender spectrum, or other complexity. Do you think this limits the validity of their work?

Be prepared to report your conclusions to (c.) and (d.) to the reconvened seminar.

Part II: Butler (30 minutes)

1. (15 minutes) As above: Please work together with your group to define the following terms and to describe how they are used by Butler. Do you have any questions about how Butler defines and uses these terms?

1. gender

2. sex

3. identity

4. the body

2. (15 minutes) As above: Work together with your group to answer the following questions about the excerpt from Butler’s Gender Trouble. Please stay close to the text and refer to it often!  Aim to reach consensus on a single answer to each question.

- (a) (5 minutes) Butler posits that the philosophical polarity between free will and determinism creates problems for how we understand the relationship between gender and “the body.” Review the paragraph on pp. 282 (which I marked in our Pressbook via hypothes.is) and those immediately following.  How does Butler connect this polarity with the question of how gender/sex/identity/and the body inter-related?  Do you agree or disagree that this seemingly esoteric, philosophical question is important to understanding the issue at hand?

- (b) (10 minutes) Return to the terms above.  Take 5-minutes to work independently to construct a diagram that summarizes how, in Butler’s view, gender, sex, identity, and the body interrelate.  Reconvene and show/discuss your diagrams.  Select one, or develop a joint version, to show to the reconvened seminar.

Part III:  Break (10 minutes)

Part IV:  hooks (15 minutes)

Please work together as a group to use Judith Butler’s essay to analyze this excerpt from bell hooks’ influential collection of essays Ain’t I A Woman.  First, discuss and define the meaning of the adjectives “Black” and “white,” and what these words mean, when referring to race.  (Note: hooks doesn’t capitalize Black, but I do here, following current anti-racist practice.)

Second, adding in the concept of race into your (Butler’s) model, try to use your understanding of Butler’s conceptualization of identity, the body, gender, and to help you comprehend the significance of Sojourner Truth’s speech.  Be prepared to report your conclusions to the reconvened seminar.

Part V:  Lorde (20 minutes)

1. (10 minutes) As above: Work together with your group to define the following terms and to describe how they are used by Lorde. Note if you struggle to understand any of these terms and be prepared to report your conclusions, including any questions, when we reconvene.

1. patriarchy

2. interdependency

2. (15 minutes) As above: Work together with your group to answer the following questions about the excerpt from Lorde’s short essay. Please stay close to the text and refer to it often!  Aim to reach consensus on a single answer to each question.

- (a) (5 minutes) Lorde’s essay critiques a specific conference, but her concerns apply more widely. First, take a few minutes to articulate her position in your own words.  Second, discuss why it is important for you – as college students – to reflect (critically) on the culture of the academy.

- (b) (5-10 minutes) Lorde makes a statement that is also a call to action:

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.

Take these final minutes of our workshop time today to contemplate what it would mean to take this charge seriously.  Begin with a few moments of quiet, individual reflection.  Track your thoughts and feelings in writing, if that helps you move into the deep place Lorde references.  Discuss your experience with your group.  You will not be asked to report out to the reconvened seminar on this question, but you are encouraged to take it up on your blog.

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Workshop 3

GENDER & SEXUALITY IN ANCIENT ROME

CLAS 112 — Pomona College, fall 2020

WORKSHOP THREE 9/8/20: ANCIENT ROMAN PATRIARCHY

General Instructions:

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Select a person to be the timekeeper.  This person should keep the group moving along according to the time allotments on the worksheet.  This job is crucial, since without it, the group will not complete the experience which the worksheet is designed to bring about.  Please select a volunteer reporter.  Everyone should make notes of their own reflections.  The reporter’s job is to record the group’s conclusions and report these out.

This workshop has two parts and is designed for 1 hour.  There is 10-minute moveable part scheduled in, which will allow time for the faculty to pop in for a chat.  Please note the start: _________ and end:__________ times before beginning.

Although we must use the internet in order to meet, please refrain from using a search engine (e.g. Google) to look up answers to questions.  If a question arises during discussion that you cannot answer without external research, please bring your question back to the seminar for discussion and/or use it as a writing prompt and do your research outside of class.

Part 0: Moveable Part (10 Minutes) Jody will pop in for a 10-minute visit.

Part I: Roman patres, Roman patriarchy (20 minutes)

The etymology, or history, of the word patriarchy begins in Greek and extends through Latin before landing in English:

From Latin patriarchia, from Byzantine Greek πατριαρχία (patriarkhía), from Koine Greek πατριάρχης (patriárkhēs, “patriarch”), from Ancient Greek πατρία (patría) and ἄρχω (árkhō).

Here’s the relevant entry from a chart of related Indo-Eurpean root words (Proto-Indo-European – PIE – is the name given to a hypothesized proto-language whence all the languages in this chart derived):

PIE

English

Gothic

Latin

Ancient Greek

Sanskrit

Iranian

Slavic

Baltic

Celtic

Armenian

Albanian

Tocharian

Hittite

*pH₂tér- “father”

father (< OE fæder)

fadar“father”

pater “father”

patḗr “father”

pitṛ́ “father”

Av pitar-(nom. also pta, ta), OPers pita“father”, NPerspadar

OIr athir“father”; Welshedrydd

hayr“father”

A pācar, B pācer“father”

*pH₂tér- “father”

Scanning through the two chapters from Shultz et al., (try control or command + f to search), work together to analyze the conceptual and discursive category: pater.  (Maybe a diagram would help?)

Part II: Understanding Roman Relationships (30 minutes)

Chapter 4 in Shultz et al. begins: “To understand Roman history, it is necessary to understand the nature of Roman personal and social relations and the religious and ethical frameworks within which they functioned.”  Taking the information provided in this chapter, work together to summarize, in your own words, or to create a diagram (or multiple diagrams) illustrating Roman familial and political relationships and hierarchies.  As part of your project, contemplate the meaning of the Latin word/Roman concept of familia as well as pater (from Part I).  Consider intersectional vectors of subjectivity: class, status (including slave/free), gender, ethnicity/race.

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Workshop 4

WORKSHOP FOUR 9/15/20: THE ORIGINS OF ROME

General Instructions:

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Select a person to be the timekeeper.  This person should keep the group moving along according to the time allotments on the worksheet.  This job is crucial, since without it, the group will not complete the experience which the worksheet is designed to bring about.  Please select a volunteer reporter.  Everyone should make notes of their own reflections.  The reporter’s job is to record the group’s conclusions and report these out.

This workshop has two parts and is designed for 1 hour.  Please note the start: _________ and end:__________ times before beginning.

Although we must use the internet in order to meet, please refrain from using a search engine (e.g. Google) to look up answers to questions.  If a question arises during discussion that you cannot answer without external research, please bring your question back to the seminar for discussion and/or use it as a writing prompt and do your research outside of class.

Part I: The Arc of History (20 minutes)

In the Preface of his voluminous history of Rome, Livy writes:

Here are the questions to which I would have every reader [5] give his close attention—what life and morals were like; through what men and by what policies, in peace and in war, empire was established and enlarged; then let him note how, with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first gave way, as it were, then sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge 1  which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

Perhaps using Ziteboard in order to work collaboratively, https://ziteboard.com/ or selecting a volunteer illustrator to show your idea, please create an illustration of the shape of Roman history, according to Livy.

Noting that the excerpt you read for today contains the preface through Chapter 13 of Book I out of the 45 books that comprise Livy’s work, where, on the arc, would you place the events depicted in these chapters?  Given where you placed the events detailed in Book I, how, then are these events valued by Livy (e.g.: are they seen in a positive or negative light, were they beneficial or harmful to Rome)?

Part II: The role of Women in Roman history (40 minutes)

1. Please go through both the Livy and Vergil and make a list of all the important female characters. As you go, describe each character: who are they?  What do they do?  What role do they play in the history of Rome?

2. Next, focus on these four: Dido, Lavinia, Rhea Silva (Ilia), and the Sabine Women. Compare and contrast their stories.  If you were to draw a Venn Diagram with four circles, where would you place each?  What commonalities would you note in the overlaps?  What thematic continuity would you describe as the center of the diagram?

3. These stories tell us a lot about how Ancient Rome was understood symbolically and thematically in its own time as well as today. How does your description of the center of this Venn diagram inform your understanding of the story of the rise of Ancient Rome?

4. Please be prepared to report out your conclusions and raise related questions for discussion with the reconvened class.

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Workshop 5

WORKSHOP FIVE 9/26/20: THE ORIGINS OF ROME, CONT.

General Instructions:

For this workshop, you’ll be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students.  Select a person to be the timekeeper.  This person should keep the group moving along according to the time allotments on the worksheet.  This job is crucial, since without it, the group will not complete the experience which the worksheet is designed to bring about.  Please select a volunteer reporter.  Everyone should make notes of their own reflections.  The reporter’s job is to record the group’s conclusions and report these out.

This workshop has two parts and is designed for 1 hour.  Please note the start: _________ and end:__________ times before beginning.

Although we must use the internet in order to meet, please refrain from using a search engine (e.g. Google) to look up answers to questions.  If a question arises during discussion that you cannot answer without external research, please bring your question back to the seminar for discussion and/or use it as a writing prompt and do your research outside of class.

Part I: One more woman on the road to Rome (35 minutes)

(5 min prep and set up)

In Workshop Four “Part II: The role of Women in Roman history” you were asked to, first, go through both the Livy and Vergil and make a list of all the important female characters.  As you go, describe each character: who are they?  What do they do?  What role do they play in the history of Rome?

And, next, to focus on Dido, Lavinia, Rhea Silva (Ilia), and the Sabine Women.  You imagined, or drew, a Venn Diagram with four circles in order to consider their commonalities, the thematic continuity in their depictions, as the center of the diagram

Today, please get settled with your new group to revisit, discuss, modify, or reconstruct, your Venn diagrams from last week, adding a fifth circle for Lucretia.

1. (15 min) Please describe and discuss Lucretia, as you did the other characters. Note, also, the similarities and differences between Livy, Dionysius, and Ovid’s versions. How does the addition of Lavinia change the thematic center of your diagrams?

2. (15 min) These stories tell us a lot about how Ancient Rome was understood symbolically and thematically in its own time as well as today. How does your description of the center of this Venn diagram inform your understanding of the story of the rise of Ancient Rome?

Please be prepared to report out your conclusions and raise related questions for discussion with the reconvened class.

Part II.  Mini-Seminar (25 min)

In the intro to “Lucretia” in our Pressbook, I asked you to begin, as you read the Joshel and Kenty essays, to think about authorial voice and compare their styles.  Taking your thoughts in response to this prompt as a starting point, please discuss these essays.  Work together with your small group to consider two or three questions that arose for you in reading – and comparing – these two pieces, in connection with the Livy, Dionysius, and Ovid.  You may wish to take a few minutes to collect your thoughts, individually, prior to conducting this mini-seminar.  Toward the end of your time, take a moment to reflect on the insights that arose through your discussion as well as questions that remain.  One (or more) volunteers from the group will be asked to report out on your experience to the reconvened seminar.

See below for general guidance on Student-Led Seminar, Zoom-style, which may help you have a productive discussion today.

Student-led Seminars

A productive student-led seminar requires several contributions from each participant.  For one, it helps to come with questions.  Please come to class on seminar days with one question already prepared!  Where do you find seminar questions?  Pay attention while you are reading to passages that surprise, confuse, or interest you.  Note your thoughts/feelings/questions (and the relevant passages) clearly in your notes so you can access them in class.  Don’t rely on memory!  There’s nothing like sitting down in a silent room (or in front of a Zoom screen) full of people who are set the task of creating a productive conversation to make your mind go blank.  Second, you should not expect a “spokes on a wheel” model of discussion with the course instructor at the center, moderating your discussion.  You are in charge.  To move the conversation along, therefore, please try to contribute the following to each discussion:

1. Pose one question for discussion;

2. Respond at least once to someone else’s proposed discussion question;

3. Contribute at least one process-oriented comment, e.g. “We seem to have exhausted our discussion of this question, shall we move on? Who has another question to propose? I see that Jane has their hand raised / has unmuted themselves / has commented in the chat …..”

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Resources (TBA)

These chapters will be added in to modules of the course as we go.  For now, they are unassigned.

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Richlin, Amy. 2014. “The Ethnographer’s Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age.”

The Ethnographer’s Dilemma — Richlin

The Ethnographer’s Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age

❧

Introduction

This chapter belongs to a time when not only feminists but many scholars in the humanities believed that what we wrotewas directly connected with political action in the world we inhabit. That belief has been sorely tested in the past twenty years, especially for those of us who work on the far past; still, maybe not wrong. Specifically, “The Ethnographer’s Dilemma”was in- spired by the concentrated reading and thinking I had been doing on femi- nism and Foucault after moving to theUniversity of Southern California in 1989. My appointment was half in Classics, half in Gender Studies, and for the first timeI was teaching feminist political theory with colleagues in anthropology (Walter Williams), history (Lois Banner),psychology (Carol Jacklin), and sociology (Michael Messner, Barrie Thorne). USC’s program was an unusual one, foundedearly on as the Program for the Study of Women and Men in Society, and always involving a large component of Men’sStudies; I fit right in, and taught in the General Education courses on women’s studies and feminist theory. There I saw at firsthand that teaching really can change people’s lives—true in gender studies in a way it rarely is

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290 • arguments with silence

in Classics, as students gain political insight and learn to see the workings of gender systems in history and in their own lives. It was a great experience, and I owe a lot to the wonderful range of students USC had in the early 1990s: inner-city kids, single mothers, returning students, the stand-up co- median Emily Levine who sat in on my senior seminar on ancient sexuality, and always the film school group.

It was team-teaching with the ever-cheerful Walter Williams that taught me to think about the glass-half-empty, glass-half-full perspectives, and how they vary according to the personality of the researcher. Ironically, the material surveyed in chapter 10 brings us back to the insight of chapter 1: depends who you ask—a depressingly relativistic conclusion for someone who believes in theexistence of historical fact. The early 1990s was a time of great intellectual fervor, in Classics particularly centered on Michel Fou- cault’s late work on the history of sexuality, since he chose to start from antiquity. I wrote a series of rejoinders (1991, 1992: xiii–xxxiii, 1993, 1997a, 1997c), impelled partly by the short shrift Foucault gave to women in his history. Foucault found plenty of defenders (see Larmour et al. 1997, Skin- ner 1996), and now the whole debate is itself fading into history (Richlin 2013b), althoughFoucault’s dicta have become a solid part of general knowl- edge about antiquity, impossible to dislodge. But this fade also suggests how chapter 10 might be viewed as an exercise in reception theory, while itself constituting part of the very long history of the reception of classical an- tiquity. Feminists are hardly the first to invoke antiquity in the service of politics, nor were we in the Second Wave even the first feminists to do so (see Henderson and McManus 1985, Stevenson 2005). The study of recep- tion has been booming in Classics for the past fifteen years, and classicists are now going through something of what anthropologists went through in the 1980s, as described in chapter 10: becoming conscious of the his- tory of what we do (Kallendorf 2007; Martindale and Thomas2006). “The Ethnographer’s Dilemma” fits perfectly well with the remarks of Genevieve Liveley addressed in the Introduction: yes, meaning is made at the point of reception. The real point of chapter 10, however, is that scholars’ choices have consequences. Without feminists there would be no women’s history, and writing that history is important for all women, past and present.

In practical terms this essay began with an APA panel in 1990, organized

by Nancy Rabinowitz and me and titled “Feminist Theory and the Clas- sics” (only a cousinly relation to the Feminism and Classics conferences which began in 1992). In the panel proposal, I wrote: “We have consciously organized a panel for the general meeting, rather than one for the Women’s

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Classical Caucus, to emphsize our conviction that feminist theory is of in- terest and use to the membership as a whole.These matters need no longer be restricted to the gynaeceum.” The panelists were Marylin Arthur Katz, Marilyn Skinner,Tina Passman, Judith Hallett, and Barbara Gold; most of us went on to put together the collection in which chapter 10appears. A major element in this chapter derives from a letter Marilyn Skinner wrote to her fellow panelists dated October12, 1990:

I’m really looking forward to this session. The “essentialists” and the “constructionists” (or, better, the pessimists and theoptimists) are form- ing battle lines, and from the wealth of brainpower and erudition on either side, it’ll be one hell of a fight.What fun!!

And it really has been a lot of fun. With serious implications.

❧      ❧      ❧

Every oppressed group needs to imagine through the help of history and mythology a world where our oppression did not seem the pre-ordained order. Aztlan for Chicanos is another example. The mistake lies in believing in this ideal past or imagined future so thoroughlyand single-mindedly that finding solutions to present-day inequities loses priority, or we attempt to create too-easy solutions for the painwe feel today.

Cherríe Moraga, “From a Long Line of Vendidas” (1986: 188–89)

Optimists and Pessimists

Why does anyone study the past? That is, what are people’s motives for do- ing this, and what are the possible results?Looking forward to the panel from which Feminist Theory and the Classics began, Marilyn Skinner wrote to me that sheexpected to see some wonderful battles between “the pes- simists and the optimists.” I have been thinking about thisaccurate but odd division ever since. How mysterious: what is there to be hoped for, or de- spaired of, in the past? Do thesehopes relate to our own progress in knowl- edge? Scholars often talk in terms of “getting somewhere,” as if all learning were aquest with a grail at the end of it, or a series of metamorphoses, with a last glorious transformation at the end. Reflecting onthe history of a field

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of scholarship, people tend to divide it into developmental stages, implying, “They were dumb then, but we’re smart now.” “Beyond X” is a common title: after structuralism comes poststructuralism; after modernism, post- modernism. Like Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, thinkers are obsessed with getting past Q to the next letter of the alphabet, and so finally to some ultimate Z. Or does our optimism or pessimism relate to our actions in  the present and our goals for the future? The problem is that the focus on hope or despair, the focus on getting to Z, has obscured political goals and divided writers more and more from any audience outside theacademy. As Cherríe Moraga suggests, it is not good to get distracted from what needs to be done.

I myself am a gloomy writer, included among the pessimists in Mari- lyn Skinner’s assessment. My research began in the late1970s with Roman satire and invective, texts now rarely read outside the field of Classics (see chapter 2). Here is the full text of apoem discussed briefly in chapters 2 and 6 (Priapea 46):

O girl no whiter than a Moor, but sicker than all the fags,

shorter than the pygmy who fears the crane, rougher and hairier than bears,

looser than the pants that Medes or Indians wear, [why don’t you go away?]

For though I might seem ready enough, I’d need ten handfuls of [Spanish fly]

to be able to grind the trenches of your groin and bang the swarming worms of your cunt.

The Songs of Priapus, a group of lyric poems in which the ithyphallic god who watched over Roman gardens threatens to rape intruders, might be dismissed as obscure, second-rate, anonymous. But there is a great deal of material like this in Latin, and indeed in Greek, in later European cultures, and in non-European cultures. The more I looked, the more I found; I soon began to hypothesize that such texts work along with basic social forma- tions, and not only in Rome. This coincided with my growingawareness of violence against women in my own culture, on my own campus, on my own street. Three months after my book The Garden of Priapus first came out, the woman who had been my co-captain on the Princeton crew was raped and murdered; she was thirty-two years old.

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So I write in anger, and I write so that oppression is not forgotten or passed over in silence. Yet I know this is not the onlyway to write. I once team-taught a course with Walter Williams, the historian of gender, whose work has emphasized thefreedom of sexual identity within Native Ameri- can and other non-European cultures. He used to tell me that the glass is half full, and that my gloomy views derive from the cultures I have chosen to study. I know that other feminists in Classics dofind positive things in those cultures. I also know that it is not part of the traditional practice of Classics to care so much aboutthe social implications of texts. As we read Latin and Greek, we distance ourselves, muffling the meaning with layers of grammar, commentary, previous scholarship. We skip things. I think that is not a responsible or honest way to read, and thatreading should be socially responsible; this is one reason classicists need feminist theory—our old way of reading keepsus cut off. As a woman, a feminist, and a scholar, I want to know what relation scholarship can have to social change. Thisquestion seems to me to necessitate serious thought about the attitudes we bring to our work—our optimism or pessimism—and their relation to action.

Thinking about optimists and pessimists and their arguments with each other within the academy, I evolved a taxonomy inorder to describe them. Sandra Joshel, whose work on Roman slavery figures below, objects that my oppositionalcategories obscure overlaps and exclude other possibilities: life is not either-or. You can imagine her saying “But . . .” at the endof each paragraph. The making of such a taxonomy is itself characteristic of one of its own main categories, and herobjection is characteristic of the other. I believe that my neat categories describe something that really exists, and needs tobe addressed in this sort of orderly way; but I concede the overlaps, which indeed give the system its paradoxical energies,and make it possible for us to talk to each other. The chart below groups theorists at two levels: according to theirassumptions about knowledge, and according to their feelings about what they study. For feminist theorists, thesedivisions are already familiar; the consideration of feeling as a motive for theory may be new. For classicists—a group thathas come to define itself as apolitical—the struggle in the new millennium to define our public worth in a marketplace ofideas now urges constant self-examination.1

The first split lies at the level of epistemology: the question of what is knowable, of how we know what we know. Somepeople believe in what is called “grand theory,” a kind of theory which claims validity across history and cultures.2 I wouldcall this an optimistic epistemology, since it takes a sanguine attitude toward the ability of a human subject to view a hugemass

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Fig. 5. Optimists and Pessimists

of information and express it in a meaningful order. Other people pooh- pooh grand theory, and, instead, trace local-historical differences. I would call this a pessimistic epistemology, since it takes a negative attitude: huge masses of information are chaotic,and human efforts to reduce them to “or- der” are futile and self-deluding, because necessarily solipsistic—not only the order but the information itself being invented by the researcher. Thus this group describes the efforts of the first group as “reductionist,” and con- demns its theories as “totalizing theories.”3 The optimists stress similarities and continuities, the pessimists stress difference and watersheds. Though some optimist groups (for example, Marxists) include historical change in their model, the pessimist groups tend to accuse the optimist groups of being ahistorical and stress their own “historicizing” of phenomena. Often models that positvery slow change—in terms of millennia—seem to regis- ter with their opponents as no-change models.

The second split lies at the level of attitude. Optimists see in the past, or in other cultures, good things to be emulated; pessimists see bad things that determine or elucidate our own ills. This split depends on personality as much as on politics. Writers accentuate either the positive or the nega- tive, usually to make a larger point; then the larger point is forgotten or obscured by the dueling details of the positive/negative picture (a major example would be the ongoing debate over ancient sexual identities).

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Optimists and pesimists tend to annoy each other and quarrel: those who cel- ebrate “women’s culture” are attacked asromantic; the cheerful, upbeat, and inventive Foucauldians are critiqued as politically naïve; the glum chroni- clers ofpatriarchy are in turn dismissed for their use of grand theory. What is important is what is getting lost, the larger point at stake,the “so what.” “See? Women can be powerful” vies with “See? Women have always been oppressed.” The implied “Then . . .”that connects to action usually remains implicit; whole social programs hover—unexpressed—behind articles on Belgianmine workers or ancient Greek pederasty. Sometimes it is hard to tell the players apart; as the chart shows, an optimisticepistemology often goes with a pessimistic tone, and vice versa. To avoid confusion in what follows, I will use “Optimist”and “Pessimist” to refer to epistemologies, “optimist” and “pessimist” to refer to attitudes.

Feminists in the academy in the 1990s were engaged in a running argu- ment about grand theory (see de Lauretis 1990for overview; Rose 1993). In this case, the issue is cast as “essentialism”—the belief that something (women, patriarchy,sexuaity) exists as an abstract entity that would be rec- ognizably the same across time and cultures. Feminist theorists inthe 1970s built their political analysis on the idea of patriarchy (gender asymmetry in which power tends to reside in malesover females), which they saw as universal, or nearly so. Moreover, whereas a long tradition in Western thought held thatwomen were essentially different from men and inferior to them (Aristotle, Aquinas, Nietzsche), and some feministscountered this by arguing for the equality/sameness of women and men, other feminists countered by arguing that womenare essentially different from men and superior to them (Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich). These feminist essential- ists stress qualities like nurturance, warmth, kindness as inherently female. But the 1980s saw the rise of postmodernist theory, (still)generally hostile to grand theory, alongside the rising consciousness of differences among women themselves acrossclass, race, sexual, and geopolitical lines. “Dif- ference” for women of color meant the assertion of identity; in contrast,postmodernist theory, despite its emphasis on the particular and on local- historical differences, rejects the idea of the“subject”—the independent individual. Instead, each person represents an intersection of fluctuating currents of power, sothat the whole culture makes up a sort of network. Anti-essentialist arguments assert that the female (for example) wouldhave a different meaning in any given culture, even that the category “women” is meaningless (see volume introduction,on Afsaneh Najmabadi); and in- deed that some constructs in culture A would not exist as such in culture B

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(for example, Michel Foucault’s claim that “homosexuality” is a nineteenth- century idea [1978: 43]). The strength of the anti-essentialist reaction seems to come partly from a feeling of revulsion against an idea that was for so long used against women; partly from a feeling that totalizing theories in- volve the theorist in speaking for other people, preempting them (a feeling that canresult in aphasia, see Alcoff 1991; hooks 1990: 26); and sometimes also from the paradoxical belief that all totalizing theory is invalid. Thus some feminists have claimed both that the essentialist concept of gender is a trap for women, and that it is not in fact valid. It is important to note that these are separate claims; too often the first (“trap for women”) is asserted as if it were the second(“not valid”). I will refer to this assertion as the “wrong because depressing” argument. Long duration does not preclude change, andwe have ample evidence that nature itself is an historical entity.

Postmodern ideas have been met by some feminist theorists with in- terest, by others with indignation.4 Without the category“women,” some wonder, how can we have feminism? The disappearance of the subject, they point out, also neatly deletes the materialexistence of oppression, of agency and responsibility; this critique often takes the form of what I have called (1991: 161) the “just-when” argument: “Just when women (people of color, colonial people) finally begin to claim subjecthood, Western elite theorists claim there is no such thing.” Still, “essentialist” is now a bad word, some- thing no one wants to be, while feminism, haingshattered into “femi- nisms” in the 1990s, is now itself in trouble as a label. Each side in the grand theory debate claimed confidentlythat its methodology pointed the way to women’s future, and would usher in profound social change. Fine: how? The title of thevolume Feminist Theory and the Classics invited the ques- tion of what contribution feminists in Classics could make to feminist theory in other fields. How you answer this question depends very much on where you stand in relation to grand theory. If you are interested in a con- struct like “patriarchy” and want to test how long it has gone on, it is helpful to have as much information as youcan get about cultures two thousand years in the past. If you are not—and “patriarchy” itself now sounds very dated as a concept(see Bennett 2006)—the value of Classics changes. If we abandon a model that charts a pattern over long periods of time, if eachculture is distinct, then time collapses into space and Classics becomes a branch of anthropology, investigating its cultures. Nor can Classics offer a special method; whereas anthropology, for example, not only finds out as much as it can about individualcultures but also posits rules explaining how cultures work, Classics stops at finding out as much as it can about

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two cultures within a set period (c. 1500 BCE to c. 500 CE), or even just at appreciating them. The rules we have generate have to do with how to find things out more accurately, how to reconstruct our long chain of evi- dence. Our only special claimwas that Greece and Rome themselves were somehow important, either because of their intrinsic worth or because of theirputative status as the origin of Western culture. When such claims are abandoned or rejected, what does Classics have tooffer? One answer is that, to those who stress difference within our culture, it has been impor- tant to stress difference inthe Western past. Those who want to prove that the modern period is fundamentally different from earlier periods need to know something about them. The glamour of antiquity is slow to evaporate. Arguments both optimistic and pessimistic oftendepend on having (or not having) an understanding of what happened in the ancient Mediterranean.

The Ethnographer’s Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age

The division into Optimist and Pessimist has taken two special forms within the disciplines of anthropology and history. (1)Feminist and postmodern- ist anthropologists have, for some years now, been increasingly involved with what I call theethnographer’s dilemma. For example: radical feminists early on decried crimes against women, and gave gen talmutilation (cli- toridectomy) as a prime instance (Barry 1979: 189–92; Daly 1978: 153–77).5 They Optimistically assumedtheir values applied to all cultures. But femi- nist anthropologists began to wonder whether it is really incumbent upon Western scholars to view other cultures in light of our own values, among which they placed feminism. Suppose that Otherwomen derive pride and satisfaction from practices we find abhorrent (“oppressive”)? This principle also applies to lessextreme examples, like division of labor (women take pride in weaving, pot-making, tuber-gathering) or religious segregation (the menstrual hut as a source of solidarity, even primacy). Whereas an old-fashioned Marxist analysiswould have called pride in clitoridectomy “false consciousness,” feminists in the 1990s became uneasy about labeling other people’s values false, preferring that each should speak for herself. On the other hand, anthropologists generallyhave become conscious that the observer cannot escape her own values; we see through the eyes so- cially constructedfor us. For a feminist, the combination of these realiza- tions produces an epistemological double bind (we should try to seethings

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through the Other’s eyes, but we can’t) and brings into question the whole purpose of the anthropological project. Maybe the West should stop being so nosy. Maybe we should just stay home. But what about home? Does this mean it’s all right for women to have cosmetic surgery? And what about false consciousness—should we learn to respect clitoridectomy? Are values ever transferable?The problem of reconciling different gender systems has only grown more pressing since September 11, 2001.

The bogging down of the ethnographer coincided with the rise of the field of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. During the 1980s, theo- rists’ attention turned to the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of many parts of the world by Europeans inthe modern period. Now that these occupations have (at least officially) been over for some time, the people who live in those parts of the world, or who returned to the “mother coun- try,” have been writing about what it means to them to have two languages and two cultures, or a mixed culture. The title of Gayatri Spivak’s classic article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), refers to the problem of find- ing a voice for those who are outside the structures of power and language in colonial systems (for example, the title character in Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi”). In what language should s/he speak? What gives people the power tospeak? These issues, long recognized in feminist theory (see Gal 1991 for a review), take on a new dimension when race, gender, and class combine with a colonial history. The voices speaking out of the colonies have turned the ethnographer’s monologue into a conversation, and remind us whose dilemma it is. For  the ancient world, the problem   is that we do have many “native” voices, but we must scramble to find the voices of women, of slaves, and of those who were literally colonized within that world.6 Since ourconversation has to be one-sided, our dilemma rarely troubles us.

One way out of the ethnographer’s dilemma has been suggested by an-thropologist Lila Abu-Lughod. In “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” (Abu-Lughod 1990: 26–27), she talks of the practice of anthropology by indigenous anthropologists and “halfies,” people of mixed cultural back- ground: “Their agony is not how to communicate across a divide but how to theorize the experience that moving back and forth between the many worlds they inhabitis a movement within one complex and historically and politically determined world.” Women studying women, she says, do break down the self/other divide, to a degree. But, unless just being a woman in our field is enough, feminists in Classics can never be“halfies.” We cannot even be participant observers. We  suffer all the drawbacks of being “colo-

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nizers” of the past—thousands of years of skewed sources, invasion into cultures that did not ask us to come—without theadvantage of actually be- ing able to go there. On the other hand, we do speak the language, to some degree; and there is noone left to resent us, nor is Messalina here to tell her own story. (Then there is the enormous question of who owns classical antiquity among the modern nations; see Stephens and Vasunia 2010, and ongoing discussion of the phrase “Orientalseclusion” as applied by modern classicists to Athenian women.)

(2) At the same time that anthropologists have been getting nervous about what we do when we look elsewhere,historians have been redefining what they think we are doing when we look elsewhen. Postmodernist historians, at least,have produced a mode of history-writing that is closely aligned with anthropology and exhibits the same paradoxes (seeVeeser 1989 on the New Historicists; Partner and Foot 2013 for this and other va- rieties). Michel Foucault inspired a schoolof critics who look for local dif- ferences in stretches of the past, mapping a terrain of ideas and social mo- res.7 Theepistemological problem on which they focus was formulated by Louis Montrose (1989: 20) as “the textuality of history, thehistoricity of the text” (see chapter 3). That is, as past events are only actually knowable to us through a screen of texts—rather, the screen of texts is all that is knowable to us of the past—so each text must be located in its historical context, and can only be understood within that context. This leaves the historian in much the same position as the anthropologist in herdilemma, able at best to appreciate and understand; value judgments are not part of this method (see Newton 1988 for afeminist critique).

However, ironically, and maybe because appreciation is still part of the method, this school of history-writing falls intowhat I would call the dream of a lost golden age. Societies in the past, especially precapitalist societies, are privileged; thestrangeness of their customs is admired, their emotions seen as free of the dread hand of Freud. This optimistic attitudeshows up, to give a classical example, in the work of the Foucauldian John J. Winkler, who often sets up what he calls“ancient Mediterranean” cultures in fvor- able contrast to what he calls “NATO cultures” (Winkler 1990a: 13, 27, 73, 93). Wesee here how the elsewhere and elsewhen can be combined.

But it is not only the postmodernist historians who look to the past for something to admire. Other kinds of historians wantto use past cultures as a means to redeem the present, or claim the distant past as a charter for future social change. This desire can be seen as a form of what is called in religion studies “chronological dualism”—a belief that there was once a

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time when everything was wonderful; then there was a Fall, so that we have the long expanse (including now) when everything is terrible;but someday there will come a time when everything will be wonderful again. Models like this combine optimism with pessimism, instages. The theorists who have chosen this model make odd companions: (1) Some feminist histori- ans and archaeologists have lookedto the past for instances of matriarchy, high valuation of women, or goddess worship; the implication is that if such a state of things existedonce, it can exist again. (This can be seen to be similar to the feminist anthropologist project of finding models elsewhere: if there isgender equality among the !Kung San, we can have it, too. As an- thropologist Micaela di Leonardo points out, this move was partlyjustified by first claiming that cultures elsewhere represented “primitive” societies, living remnants of the elsewhen [di Leonardo 1991a:15].) Most of the schol- ars looking for matriarchy in the past focus on pre- or non-Indo-European cultures and the traces of theirsurvival; some, however, have even looked to the Greco-Roman world (see Zweig 1993).

(2) Another group, among those historians increasingly seeking to put the rest of the Mediterranean world back into our picture of antiquity, has integrated Greece and Rome with neighboring African and Semitic cul- tures (see Haley 1993). For Afrocentrists,this forms part of a political pro- gram of reclaiming a great past. (3) An early and influential chronological- dualism model was produced by Engels, who was a contemporary of the early anthropological writers on matriarchy; in Origin of the Family, Pri- vate Property, and the State, he posited what he called the “world histori- cal defeat of women,” a time in the distant past when egalitarian societies gave way to male-dominated ones. This time began with the rise of states and would come to an end with revolution in the means of production. Engels’s influence on feminist theory in the 1970s was considerable.8 (4) Finally, and oddlyenough, the romantic view of the golden past also seems to be responsible for the politically conservative discipline of Classics it- self: hence the name. You would not think that the august male philologists Wilamowitz and Gildersleeve had much in common with Merlin Stone or Molefi Kete Asante or Engels, but all of their projects are determined by a belief that certain pasts are especially worthy of study and that such study empowers the student. This leaves us with a sad argument for the arbitrary nature of thehistorical endeavor, since all these romantics have sallied forth into the past and returned with completely different trophies. Even if we agree that all the trophies were there to be found, along with others, there

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is still wide disagreement about which ones are worth looking for, and how to establish criteria.

It is my goal here to review the 1990s debates in anthropology, history, and Classics, both (O)ptimist and (P)esimist,ending with some illustra- tions from the history of ancient women. I have picked these disciplines and these illustrations inorder to stress materialities as much as possible, to maintain a focus on women’s lives. The last defenders of grand theoryfight on (Bennett 2006). My own preference is for an Optimistic epistemology that maps a real reality and then doessomething about it; difference is a part of reality, not a sign of its demise.

Anthropology, History, Women in Antiquity

Anthropology

The ethnographer’s dilemma and the dream of a lost golden age were being discussed in feminist anthropology by the early1980s. In an excellent over- view, Judith Shapiro (1981: 119) divided feminist anthropological work into two types, oneseeking “to affirm the universality of male dominance and to seek ways of accounting for it without falling into biologicaldeterminism. Another [denies] the generality of the pattern by producing cases to serve as counterexamples . . . showinghow sexual differentiation may imply com- plementarity as well as inequality.” The chapters above on sexual invective andrape would fall into the first category (cf. Keuls 1993), the chapters on religion and medicine veer toward the second, thechapters on makeup and mourning combine the two. The perception of the division Shapiro out- lined as a choice betweengrand theory and local-historical differences has driven postmodernist feminist anthropologists into quandaries, for exam-ple, Henrietta Moore in Feminism and Anthropology, who begins from the premise that “the concept ‘woman’ cannot stand”(Moore 1988: 7). Moore is then defensive about doing “feminist” anthropology, and states outright that “the basis for thefeminist critique is not the study of women, but the analysis of gender relations,” dismissing earlier work (1988: vii, 6). In this, she anticipated a trend in which women per se went out of fashion; a collec- tion of essays in feminist anthropology, intended(di Leonardo 1991b: vii) as an update on the classic Woman, Culture, and Society (Rosaldo and Lam- phere 1974), was titledGender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, underscoring

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the retreat of feminist scholarship from “women” to “gender” outlined in Tania Modleski’s Feminism without Women (1991: 3–22).

The ethnographer’s dilemma is a specialized form of this grand-theory issue. Judith Shapiro sums up the problem (1981: 117):

Marxist idealizations of sex-role differentiation in small-scale societies bring us back to the Noble Savage; what we are seeing is an attempt   to seek a charter for social change in the myth of a Golden Age. This approach is also a way of avoiding one of the thornier problems that recent sex-role studies have raised for the field of anthropology, which is the question of how we can go about adopting a critical perspective on societies very different from our own.       If we engage in a critique of other cultures   do we risk engaging in what we have generally seen as the opposite of anthropology—missionization?   Do we operate with a theoretical double standard: a critique of society for us and functional- ism for the natives?

Again, the problem throws Moore into self-reproach: feminist anthro- pology, by trying to be inclusive, practiced exclusion;anthropologists were preempting third world women, and thereby being not just ethnocentric but racist (1988: 191). Micaela diLeonardo devotes a whole section of her overview to the dilemma, which she calls “ethnographic liberalism and the feminist conundrum,” and which she rightly sets in the context of anthro- pology’s general political relation to its object of study (1991a: 10): “how could we analyze critically instances of male domination and oppression in precisely those societies whose customs anthropology was traditionally pledged to advocate?” Her formulation points to a way in which this issue is relevant for Classics: classicists are trained to feel a strong love for the ancient world, a duty to cherish its memory. Thus her words bear a signifi- cantresemblance to the way in which Judith Hallett posed the problem in a 1992 conference paper: “How are we to foster a debate aboutancient Greek and Roman constructions of sexuality which acknowledges the shortcom- ings of Greek and Roman societies?”(1992a: 7). The cultural separation of anthropologists from the cultures they study, and the cultural continuities between antiquity and the present that are part of the self-definition of Classics, both leave the feminist in a position that makes it hard to justify her own critique. Indeed, to many classicists, such critiques are not what the field of Classics is about.

Golden age models and origins theories attempt to escape the ethnogra-

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pher’s dilemma via the past. Both anthropology and archaeology have de- voted attention to the question of who isresponsible for human civilization, man-the-hunter or the new contender woman-the-gatherer; some want to find woman-centered cultures in the remote past, others at least to make Neolithic women visible (Gero and Conkey 1991). MichelleRosaldo’s clas- sic essay “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology” duly includes a section on the search for origins anduniversals (1980: 390–96; cf. O’Brien and Rose- berry 1991). Best known herself as a formulator of grand theory (so di Leo- nardo 1991a: 13), she nonetheless directs a frown at origins theories, on the grounds that they depict gender systems as“essentially unchanging” (1980: 392–93). This is a version of the “wrong because depressing” argument; note also herethe way “long-lasting” or “slow to change” is read as “unchanging.” On the other hand, Rosaldo more or less concedes that“sexual asymmetry” is a universal, and calls ignoring it “romantic” (1980: 396). A good word to choose; surely thesearguments about the most distant human past exhibit clearly the mythopoeic impulse driving scholarly endeavors—therewriting of Genesis.

The discipline emerges as a battleground for Optimist and Pessimist epis- temologies, incorporating optimist and pessimist attitudes. Di Leonardo lists solutions theorists have proposed to solve the “feminist conundrum”: various typesof grand theory, including Engels’s Marxist model; various optimistic models, in which women are either said to enjoy highstatus in a given culture, or the power of their separate sphere is stressed. Her favorites are the Verstehen method associated with Max Weber, in which the inves- tigator tries to get into the mindset of the ones investigated, and a sort of feminist Marxist theory that stresses the study of political economy. She re- jects postmodernist theory (1991a: 17–27) asnihilistic, incapable of political commitment, and points out that it is possible to see problems in language without throwingthe material world overboard. Even Moore (1988: 10–11) posits a kind of feminist postmodernism that will hang on to realwomen’s real experiences, rather than just listing their varieties.

These issues matter to classicists because we, too, have to worry about dealing with cultures not our own. We need atheory that can define our relation to the people we are studying: what is a writer supposed to do who studies cultures buriedin the past, who reads “dead” languages? If the goal of feminist anthropology is to replace monologue with conversation,we have no possible equivalent. We, too, have to examine our reasons for writ- ing (about) the past; we need a theory thatspells out the relation between “antiquity” and ourselves. Moreover, as we pore over our fragmentary evi-

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dence, it is useful to us to make comparisons with other cultures. Work in Mediterranean anthropology (Brandes 1981; Dubisch1986; Herzfeld 1985) has seemed particularly pertinent (as in Winkler 1990a, and the sources  in chapter 9 above); attention is now turning towards Asia, for example through Walter Scheidel’s Stanford Ancient Chinese and Mediterranean Empires project. Studies of oral forms like fables or jokes often require a comparative lens. So we need a theory that can justify such comparisons.9

But, as feminists, we all need to remind ourselves of why we are doing this in the first place. If the idea originally was to find a charter for social change someplace else, we should not let arguments about how to find the charter keep us from working on thesocial change. We should not wind up talking about women extremely remote from us in time and space, in lan- guage extremelyremote from everyday speech, so that we never have time to talk in everyday words with women close to us. We should hold on to the reality of what we are doing.10

History

Feminist theory in history has come to focus on problems in dealing with the elsewhen much like those anthropologists have found in dealing with the elsewhere.11 Historians with differing approaches agree on some sur- prising points, particularly that the goal ofwriting women’s history is social change. Gerda Lerner begins The Creation of Patriarchy (1986: 3) with the words, “Women’s historyis indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women.” Judith Newton emphasizes the point in her materialist critique ofpostmodern theory (1988: 94); yet the eminent postmodernist Joan Scott also talks of “feminist commitments to analyses that willlead to change” in her classic essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1989: 83). These same critics are willing tobegin from the premise that history is mythmaking (Lerner 1986: 35–36; Newton 1988: 92). Lerner both acknowl- edges the human need for myth and calls on feminists to abandon “the search for an empowering past . . . compensatory myths . . . will not eman- cipate women in the present and the future” (1986: 36).12

Historians, however, are left in an uncomfortable position with regard to grand theory other than golden age models. Accepting the hortatory func- tion of writing history entails a steady reluctance to hear bad news, and more versions of the “wrong because depressing” argument. Thus a model that posits the transhistorical existence of patriarchy is defined by its oppo-

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nents as ahistorical (that is, wrong), because it involves something that does not change over time (or has not changed yet;or has not changed for as long as we have records). To Joan Scott, patriarchy watchers are pessimists: “History becomes,in a sense, epiphenomenal”; against varieties of grand theory, she sets “my hopeless utopianism” (Scott 1989: 86–87, 91), aninter- esting oxymoron. More resourcefully, Gerda Lerner suggests that totalizing theory can comprehend change:“anatomy once was destiny” (1986: 52–53, her emphasis). Such a position seems to me to be both more productive and moresensible than the wholesale rejection of grand theory. Here Classics has something to contribute: a long view. We are used tonoting trends over the two-thousand-year period which is our own domain, along with the fif- teen hundred years that cameafter. In this perspective, capitalism is a flash in the pan. On such a large scale, local-historical differences do not seem sosignificant, or so different. Rather than serving as an end in themselves, surely their best use is to modify grand theory, notvitiate it.

To solve their problem, some historians fashion a combined model that will let them describe both women’s oppressionand their agency—the fact that women were not always just victims (Lerner 1986: 4; Newton 1988: 99; Schüssler Fiorenza 1989: xv, 25, 85–86). These two concepts, “oppression” and “agency,” correspond with “pessimistic” and “optimistic”expectations on the part of scholars. Linda Gordon (1986: 23–24)—inspiring “Pliny’s Brassiere”—sketched three similarpessimist/optimist oppositions: between “domination” and “resistance” models; among Marxists, between structure andagency; and, among feminists, between political history and scial his- tory. The social historians who recover women’sculture are accused by the gloomy political historians of “romanticization of oppression.” Here we have a historical versionof the ethnographer’s dilemma: is women’s separate culture, women’s special world, a thing of beauty or part of the problem? This is where the category “women” begins to vanish down the rabbit hole. To reconstruct Greek or Roman women’sseparate culture requires years of painstaking research, putting together tiny fragments; we long to know more; and yetalmost everything we get is filtered through male texts and a culture that favored the male in many ways. A combined modelwould take into account the male nature of the sources while keeping a firm grip on the women hidden behind them.

An approach like this would be able to test the model of the “world historical defeat of women” tied, by Engels, to the riseof the state as an institution, a model which should be of interest to classicists (see Harper 2011 on law, the state, andsexuality). Rome in particular developed from

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a small-scale pastoral culture to a large-scale empire, turning other small- scale cultures into colonies as it went along. We might look at Irene Sil- verblatt’s work on the Inca (Silverblatt 1991), in which she takes a strongly optimistic view of women’s position; Judith Hallett’s work on Roman elite women leads in a similar direction (Hallett 1984, 1989), as does the new work on Romanreligion that posits a gender-integrated model (e.g., Dolan- sky 2011a, b, c; see chapter 7). The challenge, for all periods of history, isto avoid restricting our gaze to the elite, or adopting a strong identification with the studied culture as elite sources portray it. Inmany cases Verstehen all has been to forgive all.

The ethnographer’s dilemma is also noted by historians of women as a problem they themselves face; there is the same Self/Other difference, the same imbalance of power between observer and observed. Here, where elsewhere and elsewhen merge, so do the ethnographer’s dilemma and the dream of a lost golden age. As Judith Shapiro remarks of the use of the noble savage in anthropology, the distance between now and an imper- fectly known then allows for all sorts of wishful projections. The search forvalidation in the past haunts even those writers who are critical of such searches. Nazife Bashar, arguing against the usefulness of the concept of “the status of women” cross-culturally, surveys a group of English historians of women, all of whom structure their history as a progression—or regres- sion: the bad old days or the golden age. Yet Bashar concludes that, for feminists, without agolden age, “we cannot have our myth of the past as . . . an inspiration for the future” (1984: 46). Those who seek matriarchy in the past have come under attack by historians (Lerner 1986: 16, 26–35, 146–48), archaeologists (see Brown 1993; Talalay 2012; Zweig1993), and historians of religion (Eller 2000; Schüssler Fiorenza 1989: 18, 21–31). Yet many of these in turn are themselves seeking validation in the past. Lerner’s history is a search for a charter: if patriarchy has a historical beginning, it can have a historical ending. Some archaeologists just substitute woman-the-gatherer for the Goddess. Church historians are looking for some Church Mothers. The mythmaking function of history seems inescapable.

But possibly there are other functions. For a classicist, an exciting, and

surprising, extra set of motivations comes from Elisabeth Schüssler Fio- renza’s In Memory of Her, a feminist history of the earlyChurch that devotes three lengthy chapters to theory. There is no doubt in Schüssler Fiorenza’s mind about the historical relevance of the first century; to her, the Bible is a living document. Most classicists pay no attention to Christians, a minor

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cult before the late Roman Empire, or to Jews; yet, all the time, flourishing beside us, large numbers of feminist historians ofreligion are writing about the periods we regard as our own, and by necessity, many of them, writing about nonelite culture.Feminist biblical scholars often think in terms of salvage, of fining women in the sacred text, but Schüssler Fiorenza recog- nizes the operation as dangerous: “the source of our power is also the source of our oppression” (1989: xviii, 35). Feministsin Classics should compare our problematic relation to our own canonical texts, and the controversies over “reappropriating” beloved male authors (Helios 17.2 [1990]; see volume introduction, chater 5). Yet Schüssler Fiorenzamakes a claim for writing history as activism: remembering the sufferings of women in the past is a way of reclaiming them,for it “keeps alive the suffering and hopes of Chris- tian women in the past but also allows for a universal solidarity of sister-hood with all women of the past, present, and future” (1989: 31, cf. xix–xx, and hooks 1990: 43, 215). In this optimistic model,we are helping, not hurt- ing, when we speak for these dead others. We are actually doing something for them.

Women in Antiquity

If anthropology and history are perhaps overly embroiled in epistemologi- cal questions, the study of women in antiquityhas been preoccupied with empirical ones. What can we find out from our material? Feminists in Clas- sics are only toofamiliar with the textuality of history, and have made a business out of reading gaps and silences. We can attest that studyinggen- der doesn’t mean not studying women. The nature of our sources has forced us to think in terms of gender systems fromthe outset; feminists in Classics began working on gender, the body, and sexuality in the late 1970s (Richlin 1991). Mostancient women are outside literary texts; is history, we have asked, a more feminist project than literary criticism? But, inour work, we have rarely paused to worry about the ethnographer’s dilemma, and, from the 1970s into the 1990s, we tookgrand theory for granted. That certainty is pretty much gone.

A 1991 interdisciplinary collection presented the reader with the un- usual sight of a feminist epistemologistcommenting on a survey of feminist work in Classics (Harding 1991, on Gutzwiller and Michelini 1991). Sandra Harding asked (1991: 103)

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what are the feminist assumptions that permit contemporary women to identify with other women across two millennia, across the vastcultural differences between Antigone’s culture and ours, across the class, race, and sexual identity differences between contemporary female feminist readers and the imagined female audiences for these literatures.13

Harding used our praxis—Optimistically—to suggest that the ethnog- rapher’s dilemma can be overcome, that all kinds of differences can be bridged. But it’s a good question: what are our assumptions, anyway? And why do we study the past?

A look at major surveys on women in antiquity in the 1980s shows a narrow range of motives and assumptions, among which it is hard to find Harding’s question. The field may be dated to a special issue of the classical journal Arethusa in 1973 (carried forwardinto Peradotto and Sullivan 1984; see Sullivan 1973 for an account of the making of the issue, which shortly preceded a conferenceheld at SUNY Buffalo, April 25–27, 1973). Surveys and collections followed: Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (1975) is still the best known outside the field and, after almost forty years, still in wide use as a textbook, but during the 1980s waves of brave pioneers pushed the frontiers onward (see list in Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993: 306–7; overview in McManus1997). In accord with the empiricist bentof Classics, some of these justify themselves by the modest claim to be pre- senting new research results to the reader. Most also refer to the basically optimistic women’s studies goal of making women visible in history;Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant (1982), in the most stripped-down version, stop with these two assertions. However, from the beginning a tacitly pes- simistic grand theory justification from origins is present; thus Pomeroy (1975: xii):

The story of the women of antiquity should be told now, not only be- cause it is a legitimate aspect of social history, but because the past il- luminates contemporary problems in relationships between men and women. Even though scientific technology and religiousoutlook clearly distinguish ancient culture from modern, it is most significant to note the consistency with which some attitudes toward women and the roles women play in Western society have endured through the centuries.

Similarly Helene Foley (1981: xii): “In studying these literary texts care- fully we examine, in effect, the origins of the Western attitude towards

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women.” John Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan open with an explicitly gloomy version (Peradotto and Sullivan 1984: 1):

Prejudice against women . . . goes back to the very beginning of western culture . . . we are prone to idealize [Greek and Roman]cultures. . . .

Without belittling their achievements and their contributions, however, we ought not to blind ourselves to the seamier legaciesthey left us.

They go on to say in so many words that they are writing a history of gen- der oppression, likening the history of women to “thehistory of slavery and the origins of racial prejudice” (1984: 4; compare Sullivan’s similar remarks in the original journalissue, 1973: 5). This is ironic in a collec- tion that barely mentions slave women; the connection stems from the rise ofSecond Wave feminism out of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s (Echols 1989), where the analogy took a while tocome to grips with re- alities. The strong consciousness of oppression in Second Wave feminist history-writing comes fromthe experience of the writers on campuses and in activist groups in the era of Martin Luther King and Vietnam.

The field was looking for paterns rather than differences. A striking in- stance is the statement by Averil Cameron andAmélie Kuhrt (1983: ix) that “although the societies under discussion vary greatly the questions which

suggest themselves are remarkably constant.” This seems odd in a collection that includes articles on Greek, Persian,Assyrian, Egyptian, Hittite, Celtic, Hurrian, Hebrew, and Syrian women, from cuneiform tablets and hiero- glyphics, papyrusand codex; many of these cultures are not Indo-European, and the time span covered within antiquity is greater than thatbetween late antiquity and the present. The table of contents is broken down into the fol- lowing sections: Perceiving Women,Women and Power, Women at Home, the Biology of Women, Discovering Women, The Economic Role of Women, Women inReligion and Cult. A postmoernist might argue that the remark- able constancy of the questions that “suggestedthemselves” belonged to the Ancient History Seminar of the University of London rather than to the cultures studied. A fanof grand theory would counter that the constancy inhered in the cultures themselves, and was discovered, not invented.

A similar faith in unified theory was manifested by Ross Kraemer in the first edition of her sourcebook on women in ancientreligion (1988: 4):

I approach the sources primarily as a feminist historian of religion: I seek to recover and understand the religious beliefs ofwomen and to

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integrate that knowledge into a revised, enriched appreciation of human religion. . . . The texts here . . . are where we must begin to reconstruct women’s religion in antiquity, to inquire about the differences between women’s religion and men’s as well as about thesimilarities, and to revise our models and theories accordingly.

In other words, while she assembles an immense amount of particular knowledge about particular cultures, Kraemer’s project involves the cat- egories “women’s religion,” “men’s religion,” and “human religion,” and the ancient religions studied form part of these possibly transhistorical entities.

In the teeth of these disciplinary, epistemological, and political appeals to grand theory, and of her own oath of fealty to “the basic postulates of feminist theory” including a belief in patriarchy, Marilyn Skinner (1987b: 4) suggested there had been a “far-reaching intellectual shift within our own discipline,” which she called “postclassicism”:

most readily characterized . . . by its denial of the classicality of the an- cient cultural product, its refusal to champion Greco-Roman ideas, in- stitutions and artistic work as elite terrain, universally authoritative and culturally transcendent, and therefore capable of only one privileged meaning. Instead, it subscribes to the idea of all cultural artifacts and systems as broadly accessible “texts” open tomultiple and even conflict- ing readings.

Skinner’s move here conceals a step which undercuts grand theory much as in the critiques of essentialism outlined above: somegrand theory is repug- nant, therefore grand theory itself is bad. Skinner was talking about refus- ing the privilege accorded toGreco-Roman ideas by conservatives, those on the political right (in the 1980s–90s, Allan Bloom, Camille Paglia). Because of the history of right wing, anti-woman use of Greece and Rome in grand theory, Skinner, and many others, wanted to strip Greece andRome of their privileged status. There is more than one way to do this: the feminist grand theory approaches listed above make antiquity the oldest trace of some- thing bad rather than the origin of all things good. Skinner describes an alternate way, which pulls the rug out from under the right by doing away with grand theory altogether. “Denial of classicality” is the key element.

In the event, this move proved surprisingly successful, as the 2000-year grip of classical education lost hold of the curriculum; the resulting con- servative backlash, in which feminists were blamed for “killing Homer,”

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was countered perhaps most eloquently by Page duBois (2001, 2010), who loves to explore what lies across whatVirginia Woolf, in “On Not Knowing Greek,” called “a tremendous breach of tradition” between the Greeks and us.14 Meanwhile, like Skinner, David Konstan and Martha Nussbaum, in a collection influenced by Foucault, and focusing on sexuality rather than on women, criticized the tendency of grand theory to see (or construct) patterns, in quite Woolfianterms (1990: iii): “The appropriation of classical Greece and Rome as origins and models of a so-called ‘Western’ tradition has helped to obscure some of the deep differences between ancient and modern societies.” In order, then, to reject a rightwing claim on Greece and Rome as full of things the right wing likes, this group chooses to say not “those things were therebut they’re bad” but “values are arbitrary” and “different things were also there.” Things, as it turns out, that we like: differentsexualities, different attitudes towards knowledge, women writ- ers. Greece and Rome remain models, sources ofinspiration, for “post- classicists” just as they were for conservatives. The difference is that post- classicists look to the pastfor liberatory models rather than for those that preserve the status quo.

The collections in which chapters 3 and 5 first appeared returned to grand theory assumptions. Stereotypes of Women inPower (Garlick, Dixon, and Allen 1992) asked why the same kinds of negative images are used against politicallypowerful women across cultures and time (see Dixon’s “Conclusion,” ibid., 209–25). The collection traces what it names as asingle phenomenon through Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, medieval Scandina- vian, Ming Dynasty, Renaissance Italian,Victorian, and modern Austra- lian cultures. A related premise initiated Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome,which takes the pornographic to be a transhistorical cat- egory. Both collections share a focus on images that are arguablyharmful to women, some extremely harsh. In contrast, a recent collection on ancient prostitution, although it explicitly rejects any rosy fantasies (Glazebrook and Henry 2011: 8–9), and includes a lexicon of derogatory terms for pros- titutes,begins with a refusal to engage in grand theory. Allison Glazebrook and Madeleine Henry write in their introduction (2011: 4):

We do not claim to present a unified or unitary point of view. Some contributors definitely see prostitution as an unalloyedform of social oppression; oters consider the theoretical aspects more than the expe- riential. The span of time and spaceand the nature of the evidence do not permit a grand synthesis.

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Prostitution in antiquity is and is not a women’s issue: female prostitutes are very visble in our evidence, but male prostitutes frequentlyshow up along- side them, and in the same brothels. Like other big structures—the family, labor, war, all of which shape prostitution—this one would seem to call out for a grand synthesis, but in 2011 that was less possible than in 1991, and much less so than in 1979, when Kathleen Barry published Female Sexual Slavery. This state of affairs seems to be a byproduct of the political slow-down within feminism itself, as it has grown less and less possible to speak out against gender bias as systemic. Yet it is hard to seean upside to sex trafficking, and hard not to recognize that it is everywhere and everywhen. Between the pessimistic grand-theoristsand their more optimistic op- ponents, Harding’s question—what are our assumptions?—got left a little in shadow in the 1990s, andmight well be revisited now. The final discussion at “Feminism and Classics 6” in 2012 asked what makes research feminist; do weneed some common framework? Is women’s history necessarily a feminist history, and vice versa? And what kind of feminism?

It would certainly be a feminism that unsettles the nebulous, class-free world in which scholars could say “women” and mean“free citizen women.” David Schaps’s useful Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece simply wrote off slaves and prostitutes in the introduction (1979: 2), despite his title. Such a prefatory disclaimer was much disparaged, around 1990, by theorists of difference.15 Just as critiques by women of color and postcolo- nial women changed the face of feminist theory, we might have expected work on women in antiquity in the late 1990s through the 2000s to in- corporate the subjectivity of slave women and colonized women. Sandra Joshel’s work on Roman slave child-nurses (1986) might serve as a model; she went on to co-edit a collection, with Sheila Murnaghan (1998), which traced the overlapping sets {women} and {slaves}. Thomas McGinn’s work on the built environment of prostitution (2004) integrates these marginal people into the unzoned streets of the Roman city. The latest, and largest, overview of women in antiquity (James and Dillon 2012) incorporates a wide array of cultures outside Athens and Rome (with maps), meshes tex- tual with material evidence (including skeletons), and spans the millennia from the third BCE (Mesopotamian time-bytes, remarking on the impos- sibility of the task) well into the first CE (Byzantium); the contributors rig- orously interrogate their own methodology, the question of matriarchy and goddess worship is conscientiously reexamined, and, despite a disclaimer (“our decision to focus on genres of evidence means that we have had, for the most part, to overlook the great majority of women in antiquity,” 2012:

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3), the social purview is pretty wide.16 When you compare the collections from the 1980s to this one, you see the result oftwenty years of legwork btween then and now, and the difference that makes to our understand- ing of women’s livedreality. Nobody is ever going to get to Z, if that means shutting down any further arguments. But, even if we cannot arrive atexact knowledge of any woman’s life, we can get closer, as a hyperbola approaches its asymptotes.17

Pliny’s Brassiere: Still Life with Absent Objects

How (O)ptimism and (P)essimism play out in the study of ancient history depends on temperament. The examples thatfollow might be used to show the longevity of patriarchy, or the ability of women to resist by means of their own culture. Theymight be used to show the horrors of the Roman colonial system, or to recover the voices of the colonized. The tone of the picture depends on the attitude of the painter, but painting at all is a good trick when the model is just out of sight. That we nowhave a whole gallery is cause for celebration.

To stress difference, an anthropologist or historian will often stress the strangeness of the studied culture; NewHistoricists like bizarre anecdotes (Darnton 1984: 3–7). Hence the subtitle of this section, which looks back to the story inchapter 8 in which Pliny says, “I find that headaches are relieved by tying a woman’s brassiere (fascia) on [my/the] head” (HN28.76). This example exemplifies also the problems of transhistorical interpretation and translation. The word fascia isconventionally translated “breast-band” (Ox- ford Latin Dictionary s.v. 2.a), a word with no connotations in English. The oddity of Pliny’s behavior is lessened or intensified depending on whether we translate “breast-band” or “brassiere.” Tounderstand how various Ro- mans would have seen this action, we would have to know more about Ro- man attitudestowards women’s breasts, and investigate the usage of the word fascia (does it appear in Roman dirty jokes? No). The pictureof the dignified polymath laboring away late into the night at the Natural History with a brassiere on his head can serve themodern reader in different ways. For a New Historicist, it is a reminder of the uniqueness of Roman culture, and a correctivefor homogenized pictures of the Romans: not just like us, not just like white marble statues. For a feminist, it raises manyquestions about the significance of the female body in Roman ideology. Are you an optimist? Pliny valorizes the femalebody by using it to cure himself: there

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is no limit to it, he says (HN 28.77). Are you a pessimist? This is part of an ideology in which the female body is colonized for male use (look at what Ischomachus said about his wife, chapter 6); or described as filthy (look at the poems in chapter 2, or the makeup in chapter 6, or the story of the pol- lution of Juno’s temple in chapter 7); or feared as monstrous, as in Pliny’s discussions of the fearful powers of menstrual blood.

As seen in chapter 7, Pliny also tells us that Roman women chewed gum. The historian, rummaging happily through the volumes of Pliny and other encyclopedists, picks up, here and there, more indicators that Ro- man women had what ethnographers call “foodways.” Women (mulieres) are said to have preferred certain sweet drinks; again, we can translate this into Diet Coke and white wine spritzers, or we can refuse to be so misled, and Verstehen further, constructing a map of Roman women’s tastes. Opti- mistically celebrating women’s culture, we can connect this map with other indicators that matronae had a subculture of their own.The texts—not only elite literary texts but laws, anecdotes, and inscriptions—tell us plenty about Roman women’s active lives in public and private. Maybe Roman women had a group identity.

Pessimistically, we might ask, which women? Is this identity or the face of oppression? Roman lesbians are lost behind a screen ofinvective (Hallett 1997), and, as Bernadette Brooten has shown, women suspected of same-sex inclinations are viewed in some medicaltexts as mentally ill and might have been subjected to clitoridectomy (1996: 143–73). Roman women’s sexuality in general is very hard to recover (see chapters 3, 4, and 8). Nor, as seen in chapters 6 and 7, do most sources tell us about all women, and, when we find material about slave women and their female owners, sisterhood is not what we find. (The rites of Mater Matuta: women’s culture?) Yes, there are many stories of slave women who helped their owners, stood up for them, even died for them; whose stories are these? Not many stories go the other way; but then there are all those tombstones “for myself, my husband, and our freed slavemen and women,” and others set up by freed slaves for them- selves and their former owner (see Carroll 2011: 135–41). What didSulpicia Petale think of Sulpicia?

Similar distinctions between classes of women according to their sexual accessibility seem to have existed in Greek cultures aswell; the whole point of the prosecution of Neaira, for example, which tells us so much about the miseries of a prostitute’s life inclassical Greece, is that she had tried to pass her daughter off as fit to carry out certain ritual roles.18 In Theocritus’s Idyll 15, from Hellenistic Egypt, two happy, bourgeois housewives go off to the

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queen’s festival, abusing their maids and leaving the baby home with the nanny. This poem used often to be read incourses on women in antiquity to show how the power of the Hellenistic queens raised the status of women in Hellenisticculture; we might, however, compare Audre Lorde’s criticism of white bourgeois feminists whose attendance at feminist conferences de- pends on houshold work by women of color.19 The ancient tchatchke in- dustry, which produced hugemasses of terracotta figurines, seems to have included old nurses along with pretty girls (and old men, dwarves, actors) assuitable decorative objects; shades of the Aunt Jemima salt shaker. The pessimist will find further examples of inter-classoppression in art, like the ancillae holding mirrors for their owners discussed in chapter 6. This is a good test case for Engels’stheory of the world historical defeat of women with the rise of the state; clearly, the institutions of imperialism and slaveryare better for some women than for others.

Undaunted, the optimist can turn around and start constructing a sub- jectivity for the women of the under-classes,about whom the literary texts give us such a small and biased view. Maybe the terracotta figures are the- ater souvenirs,marketed to the same old women who led the ritual at the Feralia. We know there were slave women in the audience atRoman com- edies, who might have found much to inspire them onstage (see chapter 1). The essay by Natalie Kampenfrom which I abstracted the Gallic toilette scene begins with a full-page photograph of a relief sculpture from Ostia, showing a woman selling vegetables, facing the viewer, her hand extended in what is known as the “speaker’s gesture” (Kampen1982: 62). Whether she is saying, “Buy some asparagus,” or “I’m the best vegetable-seller in the Forum Holitorium,” thiswoman made her mark, and had the money to do it. The two workers who stamped their feet on the still-wet roof-tile (seevolume introduction) made their mark for free; the hairdressers in chapter 6, the midwives of chapter 8, had their skill carvedin stone; the Amiternum grave relief (chapter 9) shows the praefica in her position of leadership. San- dra Joshel in a large scale study (1992b) reconstructed a voice for the slaves and freed slaves of Rome from the inscriptions they placed, usuallyon their tombs, that talk about their occupations; here we see men, women, kin networks, the interrelationships betweenowner and owned. We find slave women and freedwomen among the religious inscriptions in chapter 7, and these are just theones who could afford to commemorate their devotion.20 Outside of Italy, there are papyrus letters from Hellenistic andRoman Egypt that often speak to and for women—some even penned by the women themselves; these have much to tellus about women’s lives. For example, a

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soldier’s letter home to his wife calmly advises her to keep the baby if it is a boy, and to cast it out if it is a girl. Another letter gives an account of how a peasant woman arrested a bath attendant who had scalded her with hot water. One gives what seems to be awoman’s shopping list.21 Wooden tabel- lae preserved at the Roman fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall indicate a network ofrelationships among army wives (Greene 2011, 2013).

The records of ancient empires constitute in themselves an argument for the transhistorical nature of the colonial mindset—indeed, they formed a sort of bible for European colonialism. For that matter, they establish the pedigree of the involvement of ethnography with empire. Page duBois es- tablished the intersection of this version of Self/Other with that of gender in Centaursand Amazons (1982a). As we turn to the next decade, we might contribute to the public consciousness of how Orientalism predates Islam; how women wore veils before Islam (see Hughes 2007, Llewellyn-Jones 2003); and how Christendom and Islam grew out of the same Mediterra- nean matrix. We can show what this meant for women.

Beyond Optimism and Pessimism

In the end, I come back to my original question, Why study the past? If feminists—optimists and pessimists alike—are all really hoping for better days ahead, how can we best use our study of the past to make that dream come true?

The one thing of which I am sure is that we cannot contribute to a revo- lution if we speak only to each other, and only in scholarlylanguage. Nor is it likely that such writing will change any laws, or feed anyone. Meanwhile, many people outside the academy do want to know about the past; we can write for them. As classicists step up to remind the marketplace what we do, we can see to it thatwomen are at the table—not just in it, as in the parable that opened this book.

What are we trying to do? Describe truth? Contribute to a revolution? Achieve immortality through the brilliance of our work?Get tenure? Prove that we’re right and the other people are wrong? Sometimes I think that scholarship is just an art form, a weird esoteric art form that often plays to an audience of one or two people; but then I think that this is the ultimate pessimisticepistemology.22 Sometimes I think that scholarship is just a job, like plumbing or typing; something we do all day, in our radical or con- servative way. Revolutionary activity mostly happens outside our working

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hours, assuming we leave time for it, and most revolutionary activity is car- ried on by people who are not scholars. Butsometimes I do think that there is something revolutionary about knowing the past; that when we recover long-gone womenfrom oblivion we are really shifting some balance; that what is taught in the classroom, what is written in the history books,makes a difference. This cheers me up. Feminists in Classics, however, are going to have to take action to connect thescholarly journals and the streets, at a time when the field of Classics itself is practicing outreach. The Commit- tee onAncient and Modern Performance publicizes productions of ancient plays almost daily; Nancy Rabinowitz spent a recentyear sitting in with Rhodessa Jones on the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women. Twenty years ago, bell hookswrote: “We must actively work to call atten- tion to the importance of creating a theory that can advance renewed femi- nistmovements, particularly highlighting that theory that seeks to further feminist opposition to sexist oppression” (1992: 81).Our future depends on keeping faith with our past.

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