Not Before Crossdressing: Cinaedi Under Attack

Hans Peter OBERMAYER Not before Cross-Dressing: Cinaedi under Attack - vestes fallentes and galbini mores in the Literature of Early Imperial Rome

“Nulla frontis fides.” - “You can’t trust appearances!” With this battle cry, the male narrator of Juvenal’s second Satire takes the pose of a “moral crusader,” (Braund, Juvenal 1996, 168) and launches an assault on the Socratici cinaedi. He is scandalized by their two-faced hypocrisy, since in public they behave as strict moralists (tristes), while privately enjoying a life of decadent pleasure (obscaeni). It is all the more astounding that the narrator allows his attack to be continued for thirty verses by Laronia, a female prostitute. Does this “cross-writing” serve as an adequate authorial gesture for criticizing the molles, who not only excessively engaged in passive sexual practices (subire, lambere), but also spun wool in a professional manner (2,56: Penelope melius, levius Arachne), thus usurping “female” terrain? After this brief exchange of roles, the male narrator launches into a third assault against these effeminates, who do not style themselves as virile moral apostles, but as “confessed” transvestites in women’s garments, turn the Bona Dea cult into a “male” event. No “true” women allowed! The climax of these inverted rituals is a “same-sex-wedding” between the “bride” and “her” husband.

Is this simply a raving satirist engaging in polemic against an established “male homosexual subculture” (Richlin, JHistSex 3,1993, 541ff.) or a “third sex” (Hirschfeld)? Does the text reflect a “confusion of both gender and status” (Garber, Vested Interests, 27)? Or is a demanding, witty game hidden behind the text’s moralizing façade, in which the poeta doctus tests the erotic reading competency of the lector doctus?

In this paper, I will provide insight on these questions by examining the intertextual play between Juvenal’s second satire and a series of “hypotexts” (Genette, Palimpsests 1982), primarily Martial’s epigrams. I will concentrate on three central problems: first, the “confusion of gender” in male-male marriage; second, the “confusion of status,” (offenses against the lex Roscia theatralis); finally, the camouflage of passive sexual tendencies by a conservative way of dressing (cross-dressing), clearly masculine body hair, a conservative, morally rigid speech (“cross-speaking”), and excessively strong odors. The basic strategy of this invective is to foil the attempts of cinaedi to remain inconspicuous. To “reveal” them provides the narrator (and the intended reader) with the greatest pleasure.

It is heartening to recall that not all cross-dressing in Roman literature inevitably breaks out into “misocinaedic” invective. For example, Ovid (fast. 2,305ff.) does not laugh at Hercules when he spends the night in a cave with Omphale, wearing her clothes. Instead, the person tricked by this cross-dressing is the target of Ovid’s amusement: Faunus believes the vestes fallentes, and is rudely awakened when he discovers the hero’s hairy calves.