Beyond Marriage: Configurations of Same-Sex Bonding in the Ancient Mediterranean

1) Bruce Frier, “Roman Same-Sex Weddings from the Legal Perspective”
2) Mark Masterson, “Getting Away From It All? (Masters and Disciples in the Desert of the Ascetics)”
3) Bruce King, “Briseis Speaks: Akhilleus, Patroklos, and the Impossible Weddings of the Iliad”
4) Kate Gilhuly, “The Lesbian Phallus in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans”
5) Richard King, “Textual Encounter and Male Homosocial Readership of Ovid’s Fasti”

Organizer: Jerise Fogel, Columbia University

The purpose of this panel is to begin to discuss the ways in which same-sex bonding configurations had an effect on and were affected by ancient societies. By “beyond marriage,” we mean not that the question of whether same-sex marriages existed is not an important one, but that it is equally important to start visualizing same-sex bonding, sexual and non-sexual, as an element of ancient social structure that had ramifications that extended beyond public validation of (or repudiation of) same-sex partnerships. We want to talk about gender-patterns in a larger way in this panel.

Two papers that primarily deal with social history are placed first. Bruce F’s establishes that it is interesting and important to look beyond state- or legally-sanctioned “marriage” of same-sex couples, to the use of the imagery and form of “coupling” to understand the psychology and possible literary use of both same-sex and different-sex pairings in the ancient world. Mark M’s examines one kind of model homosocial relationship in late antique Egypt, discussing also a particular pairing, that of St. Anthony and his disciple, Paul the Simple, showing that concern to suppress or deny same-sex desire and desire for women among male monks was in fact an important part of the ascetic value system.

The more literary papers are placed next: Bruce K’s and Kate G’s papers both deal with representations of women in literary texts. Bruce K’s paper examines the words of Briseis at Iliad 19.282-300, arguing that her organization of her own life story around her past catastrophic and possible future happy marriage (the latter marked as a fantasy) acts as “a synecdoche for every marriage depicted in the Iliad, each of which is variously unfulfilled, sundered, and mourned;” this theme sheds new light on the philotes of Akhilleus and Patroklos, which becomes as a result of its passage beyond the realm of these (equally unfulfilled) marriages a way for the poet to reflect upon the insufficiency of society in general to fully articulate consciousness and desire. Kate G’s paper also notes the way in which fictional female pairings work to comment on aspects of the contemporary society of the (male) poet, arguing that Megilla’s “lesbian phallus” in Lucian’s 6th Dialogue of the Courtesans is portrayed by Lucian in such a way as to suggest its impossibility&emdash;an impossibility that Kate suggests should be considered as a partial response to “Plato’s construction of the lesbian and exclusion of the penetrating female” in Symposium, but that it is ultimately used in a subversive way by Lucian, to undermine and destabilize ideas of power hierarchies.

Finally, Richard K’s paper shows Ovid as, in a sense, doing (with poetic success) what the Iliad had found impossible because rooted in the inadequacy of social constructions of desire: Richard argues that “in dedicating the Fasti to Caesar Germanicus... Ovid is enticing the prince to become a partner in male homosocial production of the Fasti.” Richard explains Ovid’s use of a “conventionally feminized and eroticized elegiac” tradition to “triangulate” homosocial desire for and bond with Germanicus, going so far as to offer himself (literarily speaking!) as passive recipient of Germanicus’ “active divinity... and masculine vigor...”--that is, Ovid’s homosocial literary relationship to Germanicus is triangulated through the imagery of heterosexual actual relationships between men and women.