Casey C Moore. Comparatist. Volume 37. May 2013.
Without dispute, the understood schemata for sexual relations in the ancient world significantly diverge from those of the modern world, especially those that mediated behavior in same-sex sexual or social relations. Same-sex relations in ancient Rome—and in fact, all sexual relations—were largely predicated on notions of power, of domination and submission, and of social class. As Marilyn Skinner notes, “Sex relations were structured hierarchically, in contrast to our ideal of equality between the partners, and the gender roles of active and passive partner were not tied to sex—for the person in the submissive role, at least, structural ‘femininity’ was the consequence of lower status, not sex” (19). As far as a male Roman citizen’s reputation was concerned, the biological gender of his sex partner(s) did not establish his identity—it was his role as the active or submissive sexual partner that legitimated or damaged his public identity as a masculine subject (see Miller and Platter; Wray 59-61). Despite what is often believed, there was not “homosexual identity” in ancient Rome per se (Wray 171-72). There was no word for “sexual” or “sexuality” in Greece or Rome, but rather we find ta aphrodisia (“matters of Aphrodite”) in Greek or terms limited to body parts or specific sexual acts in Latin (Skinner 3; See Parker 48-50). Despite the wide acceptance among scholars of the ancient world that erotic behavior was dictated by social rules and notions of power rather than biology, contemporary writers and human rights activists who discuss homosexual identity continue to situate its beginning in the ancient world and, often, present this presumed foundational point of homosexual identity as a “lost” utopia in which a homosexual was accepted publicly, rather than pushed into the confines of a closet. Simultaneously, radical opponents of gay rights appeal to this same historical vision as a warning of the potential consequences were full civil equality for gay people granted.
Both contemporary and ancient writers often appeal to a prelapsarian golden age/utopia to mediate the struggle for the constitution of their identities. Contemporary male homosexual identity, the defining characteristic of which, according to society, is physical same-sex acts, often seeks to legitimate itself by citing a past, lost sense of a publicly accepted homosexual identity; however, same-sex acts in ancient Greece and Rome did not establish a homosexual identity but rather an assertion or disavowal of a masculine identity. Although same-sex relations are widely depicted in the ancient world, we find few texts that depict modern same-sex “relationships.” Indeed, the idea that we can pin down exactly what same-sex relationships were like in the ancient world has been contested by more than one scholar (see for example, Drinkwater; James 6; Nikoloutsos, “Beyond Sex,” esp. 55, 76 and “The Boy as Metaphor” 27). I do not wish to discount these arguments, particularly in the realm of the aesthetically rigid genre of Latin elegy, in which the poems are heavily constructed, interconnected, and often not about what the “surface level” dialog or action a particular poem contains. This paper aims to show, through Tibullus 1.4, a concrete example of an articulation of masculine identity grounded in an appeal to the past that exemplifies not only the same-sex freedom appealed to by the gay community, but also the anxiety over the supposed seductive, overpowering, and dangerous force of male same-sex behavior opponents of human rights point to in order to deny these rights to the GLBT community.
Tibullus’s Marathus cycle (1.4, 1.8, and 1.9) has recently been discussed, by Konstantinos Nikoloutsos and Megan Drinkwater, as an integral part of the Tibullus corpus. Each argues that, rather than diverging from the subject matter, themes, or aims of the other poems in the collection and causing an “upstart” in the narrative, the cycle actually reinforces and intimately interconnects with them. While all readings of a single moment or poem within a corpus should be read in conjunction with the entire collection, as far as the perception, and approval or disapproval of “homosexual identity” in the modern world, what is consistent in rhetoric that appeals to the ancient world is not generic conventions of elegy, but rather accessibility. Part of the reason why representations of same-sex relationships in the ancient world, especially those in Roman elegy, are so readily cited in modern discourse is the accessibility granted to the reader by the poet’s use of the first person. As the writers of Latin elegy would have been trained in rhetoric, and their intent that their poems be read orally, the work “generates an immediate emotional response when it professes to communicate feeling candidly” and invites the reader to “identify with a passionately enamored speaker whose subjective experiences seem the same as our own because they are depicted with considerable psychological acumen” (Skinner 17). This identification with the speaker allows supporters and opponents of human rights to reference a time and place in which male-male sexual and romantic relationships flourished, compelling supporters to emphasize the public nature of male relationships and opponents to warn against a consuming, identity-crushing homosexuality. The poet personae in Tibullus’s Marathus cycle, in particular 1.4, as well as subjects engaging in contemporary discourse on homosexual identity, use an idealized vision of the past to pin down their own identity. By examining this impulse to look to the past in the process of defining the self in the present in Tibullus and modern gay rights rhetoric, the unstable nature of symbolic self-identification is also foregrounded.
Roman Homosexuality: An Imagined Identity
In studies of sexuality in the ancient world, the terms familiar to modern readers— homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual—are employed; however, although these are used for ease, such categories were not recognized by ancient Greeks or Romans. These terms are historically specific to modern conceptions of sexuality, and as such are inadequate as a means by which to categorize Roman male citizens (Walters 30; Williams 166-72; see also Parker). A thorough investigation of literary and historical evidence results in a basic “script” for appropriate masculine behavior in Rome—albeit the extent to which this script was followed is a matter of speculation. In his discussion of this script, which largely builds on Walters, Williams identifies three main protocols for the management of sexual relations between males in Rome: first and foremost, a Roman male must maintain the appearance of playing the “insertive role in penetrative acts,” because if he was presumed to have been penetrated, his masculinity as perceived by the public would be in jeopardy (Williams 18; see also Walters 30-31). Second, the Roman male citizen must preclude himself from sexual acts with any freeborn males and any freeborn females other than his wife (Williams 18; Walters 31). These restrictions are related to the importance of active/passive sexual acts—freeborn males were not to be penetrated—and the fact that adultery was not condoned (Williams 18-19; on adultery esp. 113-24). Consequently, at least publicly, sex acts outside of marriages were often between freeborn male citizens and slaves or prostitutes. Third, Roman men were expected to pursue “normative sexual partners” (Williams 18-19), which refers not only to the citizenship status of the sexual partner, but the generally accepted vision of a “desirable” young male (soft skin, androgynous/borderline effeminate features; Walters 33-35; Williams 19-28).
At least from the perspective of Roman society, should a Roman male adhere to these guidelines, his masculinity, his ability to be one of the viri, would remain intact regardless of the biological gender of his sexual partners (see Walters 30). As a vir encompasses hyper-masculinity and penetrative ability, he has much in common with the figure of Priapus, the god who stands guard over gardens with his overbearing, erect phallus in order to keep out thieves. Priapus embodies these varied tenets of Roman masculinity—as aggressive penetrator, ambivalent to the sex of his partners, powerful and impenetrable. Priapus is the “god par excellence of youthful and masculine vigor,” and he serves as a useful literary representation of the importance of the “insertive, penetrative role” (Williams 21). The collection of poems concerning him, the Carmina Priapea, show his harsh invective threats of penetration (anal, vaginal, as well as oral), leveled at both male and female targets. The god forcefully asserts his masculinity, threatening penetration suitable to the gender and age of any potential perpetrators: “per medios ibit pueros mediasque puellas / mentula, barbatis non nisi summa petet” (74, cited in Williams 21, translation mine [My prick will go through boys’ and girls’ middles, but will seek nothing but the top (sc. head) for the bearded]). Priapus encapsulates the biggest difference between the sexual practices of Romans and their Greek predecessors—disjointed power dynamics in erotic relationships.
The varying societal expectations for Roman males’ sexual partners, as well as the emphasis on a masculinity predicated on force, are features that distinguish Greek and Roman sexual practices. Although, undoubtedly, the same physical malemale sexual acts were occurring in both civilizations, the importance of power relations was paramount in Rome. The Roman view of pederasty (paiderastia), “sexual and romantic relations between citizen men and freeborn adolescent males,” is indicative of one of the disjunctions between Greek and Roman civilizations (Williams 11). Citing Rome’s subsequent negative response to pederasty, Williams argues that although homosexual/homoerotic behavior was (or would have been) practiced amongst Roman males without any influence from the Greek past, it was only the practice of paiderastia that was considered by the Romans to be a Greek phenomenon (11). In Rome pederasty was publicly viewed as shameful (an act of stuprum) specifically because of the belief that no Roman citizen should be penetrated or act as the passive sexual partner. Nevertheless, pederastic relationships appear throughout Roman literature. Although the pederastic “relationship” presented in the Marathus poems cannot be considered evidence for a precise replication of a Roman pederastic relationship, it does show how male-male erotic identity is embedded within an appeal to the past.
Priapus: A Revised Erastês
In Tibullus 1.4, the hyper-masculine figure of Priapus and the practice of pederasty are intertwined through the typical dynamic of heterosexual relationships in elegy. Priapus as a figure demonstrates the divide between Greek and Roman norms for sexual behavior, as “Roman society has been characterized as ‘sadistic,’ ‘macho,’ or ‘Priapic’ whereas Greece is not, at least in any exaggerated way” (Skinner 197). The speaker solicits Priapus to find out by which skill the god captures handsome boys (quae tua formosos cepit sollertia? [1.4.3]). The poem at first appears as an abrupt shift in the collection’s subject matter, as the first three poems of the book concern the affair with Delia. As the Tibullan corpus is “best read as complex, multi-voiced dream texts that construct a world at once idyllic and nightmarish” (Miller, “The Tibullan Dream Text” 181), Tibullus’s “uncertain position,” and the subject change to a (at first) general discussion of pederasty denies either “fulfillment or frustration of his dream” in 1.3 (Bright 235). Bright argues that Tibullus’s utilization of Priapus-asspeaker is a means to “surprise” the reader, redirect the tone presented in the first three poems, and remove the poet himself far from the subject of pederasty. Alternatively, Miller (1999) and, in slightly different terms, Fineberg (1999), suggest that the contradictions that appear throughout the poems “reveal the limits of a given ideological or signifying structure and thus point to a realm beyond the narratives that individuals or cultures use to explain the world” (Miller, “The Tibullan Dream Text” 182). The figure of Priapus, who encompasses the tenets of Roman masculinity, is one such insufficient identifier. Because the attitude toward pederasty serves as a point of differentiation between Greek and Roman practices of sexual acts between males, the presence of Priapus as speaker in a pederastic poem shows the malleability of symbols rooted in male-male erotics as means to constitute identity.
Inasmuch as Priapus serves as a paradigm for the performance of masculinity in Rome, coupled with the fact that he acts as speaker in a poem concerning pederasty, a disjunction between signifying systems of masculinity and the “sanctioned codes of the world [Tibullus] inhabits” is highlighted (Fineburg 423). As noted above, the masculinity of a Roman citizen as perceived by his community was far more important than sexual acts within the privacy of his own bedroom. Romans took various physical manifestations, such as heightened concern with one’s appearance (use of perfumes, hair removal), as indicative of a lack of masculinity that connected how a man “walked, talked, and looked” with whether or not, in private, he played the insertive or submissive role (Corbeill 166; see also 12-53, 128-69; Williams 192). Inviolability to penetration for a free Roman male was legally protected, but this protection was only for the vir. Although vir typically is translated as “man,” it does not encompass biological sex but rather “gender as social status” that includes not only gender but “birth, citizenship, and respectability” (Skinner 195; see also Oliensis 154-55; Walters 32). In the opening lines of 1.4, Priapus stands as the antithesis of the perceived effeminate man, as the speaker remarks, “without a doubt you do not have a shining beard, nor well-kept hair” (certe / non tibi barba nitet / non tibi culta coma est [1.4.4]); however, as Putnam observes, his vulnerability is immediately alluded to: “naked, you endure frost of cold winter, naked, you endure the dry time of the summer Dog-Star” (nudus et hibernae producis frigora brumae, / nudus et aestivi tempora sicca Canis [1.4.5-6]). Putnam asks, “How can the garden god aid a lover if all he brings upon himself is rain and heat? And at the same time he is dependent on someone else to evoke the shade he needs as protection against the elements … Priapus only stands helplessly exposed to the weather” (Putnam 89-90). With the repetition of nudus (naked, bare, stripped) there is a suggestion of Priapus’s impotence, which foreshadows the deity’s progressive lack of control as the poem continues. The anaphora, or “closely clustered repetition of successive beginnings,” is a trope that continues throughout the poem (Fineburg 420), and, as Fineberg argues, is indicative of Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic because “the effect of repetition exceeds the ability of words to explain,” instigating the multiple beginnings that “inform any act of signification” (421). As the figure of Priapus changes, particularly in relation to his control and power, the instances of anaphora are in conjunction with necessary, repeated attempts at selfidentification. This strategy highlights how power relations in the poem affect the sense of time and urgency.
After the opening admonition of pursuing the affections of young boys because they “always possess a reason for true love” (o fuge te tenerae puerorum credere turbae, / nam causam iusti semper amoris habent [1.4.9-10]), Priapus offers a list of attractive traits of teneri pueri that coincide with the prototype of socially acceptable objects of affection—softness, modesty, tender cheeks (1.4.11-15; see also Nikoloutsos, “Beyond Sex” 66). Fineberg draws attention to the fact that through the repetition of hic, hic, hic, ille, what surfaces is an “impersonal inventory that could be a description of slaves on an auction block” (424) and that calls attention to “asymmetrical” power relations—the gap between a Roman citizen and his subordinate (usually servile) passive sexual partners. The asymmetrical power relations that open 1.4 are maintained as the poem continues; the objects of desire are pueri, and emphasis is placed on their domestication. Priapus tells the speaker of the elegy to control himself “if at first by chance he denies you” (primo si forte negabit [1.4.15]), to not allow weariness (taedia) to capture him—“little by little he will give his neck beneath the yoke” (paulatim sub iuga colla dabit [1.4.16]). What follows is a series of images of taming and controlling:
longa dies homini docuit parere leones,
long dies molli saxa peredit aqua;
annus in apricis maturat collibus uvas,
annus agit certa lucida signa vice. (1.4.17-20)
(A long day has taught lions to yield to man, a long day has wasted away rocks with water; a year ripens grapes on sunny hills, a year drives clear signs in fixed succession.)
As Fineberg observes, the anaphora in these lines (longa dies and annus), through which Priapus speaks “controlled and balanced rhythms with the detached authority appropriate to a deity,” only intensifies his following atypical behavior (424). The transition to Priapus’s change in behavior is first indicated by a change from the appeal to patience and control to “temporal urgency” (1.4.27-32; Fineburg 424-25). Priapus’s control, over himself in particular, is slipping:
at si tardus eris, errabis: transiet aetas
quam cito non segnis stat remeatque dies.
quam cito purpureos deperdit terra colores,
quam cito formosas populus alta comas!
quam iacet, infirmae venere uni fata senectae,
qui prior Eleo est carcere missus equus!
(But if you delay, you will make a mistake. How quickly the age will pass; the day may not stand idle nor return. How quickly the land loses its dark red colors, how quickly the high poplar [loses] its fair leaves! How, when the fate of weak old age comes, the horse lies down, who before was sent from the starting gate at Elis!)
These lines both recall and negate the earlier depiction of Priapus’s appeal to patience and control; the days are no longer long, but pass quickly—there is no time in which to wait for grapes to mature, or observe the slow process of the erosion of rocks—the earth can pale in just a short day.
The tener puer, who before would eventually submit to the yoke, takes his place in the power position over the lover: “You will yield to the boy in whatever it will please him to do: love conquers the most by servility” (tu, puero quodcumque tuo temptare libebit,/ cedas : obsequio plurima vincet amor [1.4.39-40]). The lover will not refuse to follow after the puer on “long journeys,” no matter what resulting trials he will encounter (1.4.41-46), and he is advised by Priapus to subordinate himself, even through physical labor as servant, for the affections of the puer:
nec te paeniteat duros subisse labores
aut opera insuetas atteruisse manus,
nec, velit insidiis altas si claudere valles,
dum placeas, umeri retia ferre negent.
si volet arma, levi temptabis ludere dextra:
saepe dabis nudum, vincat ut ille, latus.
tunc tibi mitis erit : rapias tum cara licebit
oscula : pugnabit, sed tamen apta dabit.
rapta dabit primo, post afferet ipse roganti,
post etiam collo se implicuisse volet. (1.4.47-56).
(May it not displease you to go under harsh labors or to chafe your hands, unaccustomed to work, nor, while you are pleasing [to him] refuse to bear the hunting nets with your shoulder when he may wish to close off the end of the valleys with ambushes. If he wishes sparring, you will try to play with a light hand: so that he may conquer, often you will surrender your bare side. Then he will be gentle to you: then it will be permitted that you may seize precious kisses: he will fight, but nevertheless, fitting, will give them. He will give them, at first stolen, but afterwards offer them himself being asked, then truly he will wish to bind himself to your neck.)
Priapus says that the lover must first submit, act as a slave, to the puer before he will, in turn, place the puer under his control. Priapus at first said that patience would allow time for the beloved to submit to the yoke (paulatim sub iuga colla dabit 1.4.16), and during the course of the passing time, the lover must act as a slave himself. The advice, as Putnam remarks, is to “grant whatever will tempt your beloved. Be subdued in order to subdue” (95). This suggestion is ironic, coming from hypermasculine, penetrative Priapus, as well as an inversion of Roman societal expectations as the lover becomes weakened and subordinate.
The lover as a slave of love, servus amoris, is a common trope in elegy, and the fact that the elegiac lovers cast themselves as “the slave of someone who has very little real social power is a pretty risk-free proposition” (Miller, Subjecting Verses 4); however, what is particularly interesting in 1.4 is the juxtaposition of the hypermasculine figure of Priapus, or emblematic masculine virility, and his argument for submission. This placement of oppositions is not unique to 1.4. Throughout Tibullus’s elegies, as Miller observes, the speaking subjects in the poems often, even as they are voicing familiar values, adopt “positions that would be highly unusual for an elite male to claim as his own.” For example, in the opening poem of the collection, in the midst of appeals to the virtues of rural living, inertia (laziness, impotence) is given as a primary value, and in the same poem Messalla’s military prowess is laid next to a depiction of Tibullus as slave to his mistress (Miller, “Tibullus”). In all these instances, “the appropriate recognition of elite male values sits cheek by jowl with those of the socially and sexually humiliated” (Miller, “Tibullus”). By evoking and undermining tenets that would have constituted Roman-ness, the poet is (re)negotiating his own identity in a period of uncertainty—demonstrating the failure of previously existing means of self-definition (as oppositional to a pederastic Greek lover as well as Priapic sexual aggressor).
Given the historical circumstances of the time Tibullus was writing, it is not surprising that his works demonstrate a struggle for the redefinition of masculinity. The Roman living during the collapse of the Republic was necessarily affected by the change in the meaning of words that once represented Roman power and erotic relations. These linguistic changes were particularly evident in the desire to express masculine identity. The changes in meaning caused an inner turmoil for the speaker/lover when trying to grasp an adequate vocabulary because one was simply not available, which results in contradictory positions for speaking subjects attempting to define a desire that is unsignifiable (Greene 87-71; Miller, Subjecting Verses 16-30). The array of speaking voices and gender inversion in Tibullus are symptoms of “a desperate attempt to break away from an ideological crisis” that defined the time between the fall of the Republic and growth of the Principate (Nikoloutsos, “Beyond Sex” 59; see also Lee-Stecum 280). As Fineberg suggests, because in Augustan Rome the creation of new opportunities for Roman male elites was simultaneous with limits “linked with a return (or at least a myth of return) to the stern morality and civic officium of Rome’s republican forebears,” the Tibullan speaker is “neither comfortable in this Rome nor able to secure his retreat from it” (Fineburg 423). This contradictory environment informs the varied personae, images, and symbols for signification of masculinity and is indicative of why the poet’s appeal would not only be to the past, but to a utopian past that is radically removed from that of present Rome.
The speaker’s attempt to (re)define Roman masculinity is apparent within Priapus’s change from the beginning to the end of 1.4. Whereas earlier in the poem Priapus is setting out guidelines, in an erotodidactic fashion displaying “detached control,” as he continues he exhibits “increased emotional involvement.” The authoritative voice of Priapus has transformed into that typical of the poet-lover (Fineburg 425), beginning with his lament, “heu male nunc artes miseras haec saecula tractant! / iam tener adsuevit munera velle puer” (1.4.57-58) [Alas! Wickedly, now the ages draw out wretched arts! Now the soft boy is accustomed to wish for gifts]. The demands of the pueri have become increasingly mercenary, and the garden god is no longer the one holding all the power. The fact that now (nunc) there has been this change, that now (iam) the world of love has degraded to such a state necessitates that there has been a fall—that things were not always this way. As Fineberg writes, “Lost in an impossible dream of an amatory golden age in which love is won not by money but by the language of the heart, the speaker seems simultaneously trapped in an intransigent reality in which the reverse is true” (426).
Tibullus 1.4 repeatedly attests to the power of poetry—it is poetry that made the lock of Nisus purple and Pelops’s ivory shoulder shine (carmine purpurea est Nisi coma: carmina ni sint / ex umero Pelopis non nituisset ebur [1.4.63-64])—and promise of immortality for those chosen to live within poetry, “quem referent Musae, vivet, dum robora tellus / dum caelum stellas, dum vehet amnis aquas” (1.4.65-66) [He whom the Muses recall will live as long as the earth bears oaks, as long as the sky bears stars and as long as the river carries waters]. The “comfort” within these lines is “short-lived” when the greedy beloved reappears. Priapus threatens the one who “does not hear the Muses, who sells love” (… qui non audit Musas, qui vendit amorem [1.4.67; Fineburg 426]). It is interesting that, here, Priapus threatens the beloved who does not yield to the power of poetry, not someone who could potentially “unman” Priapus, as is seen in surviving inscriptions of Priapus’s threats. One should not yield to brute force and quintessential masculinity but to the power of language—a power available to one in Tibullus’s position at that time in Rome, as his role as poet did not come with the same anxieties of military or political advancement.
In the concluding lines of Priapus’s speech, where he continues his threat to the mercenary beloved pueri who do not “listen to the Muses,” he curses the guilty puer with the paramount loss of masculinity (1.4.68-72):
Idaeae currus ille sequatur Opis
et tercentenas erroribus expleat urbes
et secet ad Phyrgios vilia membra modos.
blanditiis volt esse locum Venus: illa querelis
supplicibus, miseris fletibus illa favet.
(Let that one follow the chariot of the Idaean Ops and fill the tale of three hundred cities with his wanderings, and may he sever his worthless genitals in the Phrygian way. Venus wants flatteries: she favors pleading suppliants and wretched weeping.)
The fact that Priapus essentially curses the puer to become a castrated follower of Cybele is a direct threat of a “loss of masculinity” that would cause Roman readers to recollect Catullus 63, the poem on Attis, who castrates himself in a frenzy for Cybele, losing his gendered identity and, maddened, is doomed to serve the goddess forever (noted in Fineburg 426). The image of devotion to Cybele and castration that figure in Tibullus’s poem, however, serve as further instances that present the instability and anxiety surrounding Roman masculine identity (and modern masculine identity)—that one’s masculinity is perpetually at risk. Priapus’s threat, after all, comes from his own masculine anxiety. When Priapus begins his speech, he exudes his “legendary sensual prowess to an unwilling pathic puer” (Fineburg 247), using terminology of domestication and submission, only to slip into a more emotionally involved poetic voice. The curse of the betrayed lover in the poem does not only try to reverse the power dynamics within the relationship but also “reduces [the puer] from a respectable object of desire—to a boy that is worth suffering, like that of a slave” (Nikoloutsos, “The Boy as Metaphor” 33). The culminating image shows a construction of masculinity in danger of self-annihilation by means of castration, and, as Fineberg concludes, Priapus presents the “threatening allusion to the mythic paradigm of what abdicated masculinity would mean for a Roman youth: irreversible retreat from Rome, eastern effeminacy, and castration” (427).
Tibullus 1.4 uses the subject of Greek pederasty to emphasize Roman power relations (as opposed to more equal relations in Greek pederastic relationships) and make the practice nostalgic (because of the absence of monetary greed) while attempting to define a Roman masculinity that could function in the current Roman climate. Priapus enters as a figure to assert the power relations important for Roman sexual relations that were perceived as absent from the Greek practice of pederasty, in which, although usually different in age, the erastês and erômenos were of the same social standing. Nevertheless, with Priapus’s slip from controlled, authoritative, erotodidactic voice to a more emotionally-involved lover, held at the whims of the greedy puer, and even with the lost utopian appeal punctuating the text, no stable image of masculinity emerges. According to ancient Greeks and Romans, the sexual dynamic under discussion is, in a sense, the same—a male-male erotic relationship—but its depiction is skewed, depending on the societal situation, to establish different aspects of identity.
Priapus’s transition in 1.4 makes all roles within the poem unstable. While at the beginning of the poem the speaker is a “seemingly disinterested interlocutor” who wants to be a praeceptor amoris for the emotional victims of boy love objects, he emerges as a servus amoris by the end of the poem, and, consequently, a viable speaker of elegy (Drinkwater 430). The unexpected conclusion of 1.4, Drinkwater says, “is a hint that Tibullus, or his speaker, is presenting unstable characters in his group of poems, and that those we think we can identify in terms of their role will change abruptly, disorienting the reader by failing to fulfill her or his expectations” (430-31). The unstable characters show, for Drinkwater, a new articulation of elegy, as well as support for previous work on Roman sexuality; however, this instability of characters highlights the instability of masculinity and impossibility of nailing down a fixed presentation of male-male relations. With the fissures, spaces are opened up for the reappropriation of the male-male erotic relationship, regardless of its actuality, through the modern world. Once a text becomes published, separated from the author, “it threatens to become an autonomous discourse, a nexus of ideas interpreted independently of the author’s initial intentions” (Nikoloutsos, “The Boy as Metaphor” 39; Tib. 1.3.35-48), and this is exactly what happens when “ancient homosexuality” is recollected in modern discourse.
Ancient “Homoerotic Social Acceptance”: One Man’s Utopia, Another’s Ticket to Hell
Sexual identity in the modern sense is almost always strictly defined by the biological sex of the person with whom someone engages in sex acts. As time has progressed, multiple terms have been coined in order to delineate, as snugly as possible, specific sexual categories—homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, gay, lesbian, transsexual, transgender, bi-curious, queer, transvestite, kink-positive, vanilla—that will grow in number almost indefinitely. Even as the list of sexual identities grows and changes, one constant within discussions of sexuality is reference to the ancient world. The gay male community in particular appeals to the ancient past as a time of openness in which a person identified as homosexual could live honestly and publicly. Conversely, the opponents’ side argues that such openness would threaten not just an idealized, nonexistent form of presumed stable masculinity but the heterosexual relationships and the institution of marriage itself.
John Boswell, even though he does not challenge sexual terms (homo/hetero/ bisexual) in the same way that Williams does, says that the terms for the sexual categories of today are “rare in ancient literature, which nonetheless contains abundant descriptions and accounts of homosexual and heterosexual activity. It is apparent that the majority of residents of the ancient world were unaware of any such categories” (Boswell 58). He asks the question that inspires the modern appeal to an imagined golden age for homosexual men: “How can a dichotomy so obvious to modern society, so morally troublesome, so urgent in the lives of so many individuals, have been unknown in societies where homosexual behavior was even more familiar than it is today?” (Boswell 58). Despite the fact that, as mentioned above, there was no “homosexual” identity in the ancient world within the dominant public discourse, there nevertheless arises an idealized past of imagined homosexual acceptance that incites a longed-for return in the modern time. For example, the Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture cites Catullus as a “modern gay ironist,” Tibullus as a “gentler soul” in revolt, and Vergil as a poet who always wrote “approvingly of male love.” The contributors to this online encyclopedia are not evaluating the generic conventions, let alone the socio-political contexts of these authors, but rather an imagined ancient state of affairs that seems useful to pinning down their own conceptions of homosexual identity. In some cases, the gay utopia is even further exaggerated, as in Rebecca Drysdale’s song “It Gets Better” in which she includes “all the Romans” on her list of famous GLBT figures, in between Dave Hyde Pierce and Tommy Tune.
Dan Savage, a popular sex therapist, journalist, and political activist, cites Plato as a means to legitimate describing his relationship with his husband as “one flesh,” a term that makes conservative Christian opponents of gay marriage particularly uncomfortable:
But the notion that two people in love are one flesh predates Christianity by five centuries … In his Symposium … Plato attempts to explain romantic love. Human beings were once two people combined, Plato wrote, with two heads, two sets of legs, and two sets of arms. There were three sexes: humans with two male halves; humans with two female halves’ and humans with one male and one female half. Zeus punished humanity for some imagined slight by cutting all the two-headed, four-legged people in half, condemning us to wander the earth in search of our missing other halves. Homosexuals were originally part of a male/male whole, lesbians were part of a female/female whole; and heterosexuals were part of a male/female whole. “And so,” Plato wrote, “when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation … something wonderful happens: The two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment. These are the people who finish out their lives together.” (120-21)
Savage, a self-proclaimed “culturally Catholic” atheist, does not recount his understanding of the Symposium as something to believe in (“It’s a nice thought, but … I can’t imagine a worse fate than being welded to my boyfriend” [121]), but to show that same-sex acts were not always viewed as abhorrent or perverse. And male same-sex acts were obviously not abhorred in the ancient world; however, they did not constitute an identity as modern society conceives of it. The representations of same-sex relationships in literature are not evidence for actual relationships, or orientations of the Roman authors themselves. Nevertheless, the writers and perceived ideologies of ancient literary works are consistently evoked, and not only by gay men or proponents of human rights yearning for a long past utopia.
Savage, his writers, and his commentators are not the only people citing an age of non-discrimination with regard to sexual orientation—those who oppose same-sex marriages discuss the same practices in the same civilizations as a way to define same-sex acts as dangerous, threatening, and debased. Joshua Berman’s Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Thought was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. Berman, in a video on the main page for his book, says that he wrote the book not from a theological stance, but to demonstrate that what he calls the “five books of Moses” were revolutionary in the sense that they give a “blueprint” to order society socially in a “far more egalitarian” manner than existed before. His speech to the potential reader emphasizes the book’s foundation in scholarship, rather than faith, but that he cannot control what any particular reader may take away, theologically or scholarly, from his work. This is a fair disclaimer, given the intense reaction a discussion of any religious text elicits; however, Berman also serves as a frequent respondent to the blog Kingdom of Priests: David Klinghoffer on Recovering the Wisdom of the Hebrew Bible, where Berman has offered scholarly responses on various topics—most pertinent to this discussion are his “reflections” posted in response to Klinghoffer’s piece about gay marriage in “corrupt Canaan.
Klinghoffer reposts Berman’s remarks in “How Women Will Be Hurt by Gay Marriage.” He begins:
As a scholar of ancient civilizations, I know that we gain invaluable insights by drawing from the observations of others who grappled in their time with the experiences that we are just beginning to face. On the issue of same-sex marriage, we have much to learn from the writers of ancient Rome. Reading them brings me to the conclusion that were I a woman, I would be concerned by the tide of legislation now sweeping our country.
Women, he argues, are threatened by the legalization of gay marriage because of what the “aim” of the gay rights movement is—“to win over the culture: to arrive at a day when homoeroticism is fully accepted” (2009). He further supposes that, should full acceptance of homoeroticism be attained, in the future a young male reading a history book would be “shocked to discover that the percentage of men who were sexually interested in other men stood only in the single digits” in the twentieth century because “everyone he knows engages in this regularly.” For Berman, license of same-sex relationships between men would cause a phenomenal rise in homosexual men, as if homoeroticism were a contagious disease that needs to be quarantined.
Berman asserts that the reason why everyone would engage in same-sex behavior in a homoerotic-accepting world is that Roman literature shows that when homosexual behavior is accepted, it flourishes: “Men, we learn from ancient Rome, will enjoy sex with other men, if there is no social censure.” He cites Catullus (134- 41), where the speaker says it is hard for the husband to give up “smooth-skinned boys” as a reason why this sexual freedom is damaging to marriage in particular. Berman argues that “once they’ve experienced sex with other men, Catullus tells us, men are unsatisfied with what their new wives provide them. Notice that the poet is unconcerned about the husband’s dallying with other women—it’s the other men around that threaten the marital union.” In this situation, Berman argues that women will have a harder time finding and holding onto male partners, damaging the “nuclear family.” Instead of putting forth an argument that simply says “the Bible says homosexuality is wrong,” he provides what he calls a “utilitarian argument,” backing it with his knowledge of the ancient world. Berman concludes that, “full social sanction for the homoerotic bond is opposed not for God’s sake, but for the sake of tomorrow’s women.”
Berman is not the only gay-marriage opponent who uses the ancient past to warn of the dangers of the social acceptance of homoerotic behavior. Sally Kern, an Oklahoma state legislator, was secretly recorded in March 2008 saying:
Studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades. So it’s the death knell of this country. I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam—which I think is a big threat, okay? Cause what’s happening now is they are going after, in schools, two-year olds … And this stuff is deadly, and it’s spreading, and it will destroy our young people, it will destroy this nation.
Reactions to her comments, which she refused to apologize for, incited intense reactions on both sides of the debate—gay civil rights supporters arguing that Greece and Rome lasted longer than “a few decades” and that homosexuals had nothing to do with the ends of the respective civilizations, and Kern’s supporters citing the civilizations’ “destructions” as consequences of immoral homosexual behavior.
In Tibullus 1.4, the practice of Greek pederasty is present, discussed through the mouth of an exaggeration of realized Roman masculinity, Priapus, as a means to reimagine the Roman male. Although the mention of male-male sexual relationships neither provides evidence for an actual relationship of Tibullus’s or the speaker’s, nor reveals an ancient “homosexual identity” analogous to the modern understanding, this Roman discussion of male-male sexual relations differentiates Greek and Roman notions of masculine identity and provides substance for dialogs concerning homoeroticism in the modern world. With the emphasis on the importance of proper power relations in Rome, the pederast as a model of identity no longer fits; however, hyper-masculine Priapus shows that the Roman conception of masculine identity fails as well. Priapus is an insufficient symbol with which to constitute the masculine identity within changing Rome. His change in tone and power position throughout the poem and inability to maintain control presents the same kind of presumed dangers opponents of human rights voice concern for.
Thousands of years later, these perceived ancient homosexual identities, with Greek and Roman representations often conflated within the public discourse, are reappropriated for further attempts at self (or other)-identification. Savage, Klinghoffer, Kern, and Berman all use the same fodder for self-identification, namely, evocations of the past. This imagined past entails license for homoerotic behavior as well as the danger of homoeroticism’s exposure to tenuous masculinity. Gay rights activists look to the ancient past as proof of a long-standing homosexual identity, as well as an ideal social situation to which to return—even those activists who acknowledge that such an appeal may be flawed. Their (usually radically Christian) opponents, conversely, cite the same period of presumed acceptance, and its collapse, as proof of the fatal dangers of the “homosexual lifestyle” and its domino effect as it unapologetically “transforms” heterosexual men into homosexuals with great speed. The divergent use of the symbolic representations related to male-male sex acts highlights their instability and inherent insufficiency. Signifying terms, symbols, and categories used for self-identification will continually take on new meaning and new uses as a result of this instability, and perhaps in the case of the struggle for gay civil rights, become increasingly combative if a Priapus does not come along to show their inefficacy.