John G. YOUNGER, organizer
Duke University
The Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Classical Caucus sponsors its fourth mini-colloquium on the current state of studies in the area of gender and sexuality in the Classics. For this panel, the LGBCC adopts the theme: "Men's Culture, its Formulation and Tran smission". Five papers are here offered, all of them to some degree about defining masculinity and masculine desire especially in the o/apposition to the feminine.
Pam Gordon ("Effeminatus, Gallos, Kinaidologos: Entries from a Lexicon of Anti-Epicurean Discourse") announces the theme of the panel: masculinity:ambivalence; this paper describes how Epicurean teachings on the relationship between pleasure and central social values problematized them so that their resultant ambivalency looked feminine and the philosophers themselves assumed a feminized reputation. Such a feminine construction of ambivalency contrasts with the masculine construction of single-purposed performativity.
Mark Anthony Masterson ("The "Nature" and Use of Roman Slave Masculinity") takes a structuralist approach in defining Roman masculinity by analyzing closely the philosophical and legal statuses of slaves; as they were non-men by nature or by law, so their masters were constructed as "real" men by both.
David D. Leitao ("A Male Pregnancy Ritual from Amathous, Cyprus, and the Strategies of Replacement") discusses an odd ritual in Cyprus where once a year a youth imitates a pregnant woman giving birth; the replacement of a woman here may mark a male desire to assume even the capability of creating life, thus displacing women, as well as the fear of becoming, in the process, woman.
Daniel B. McGlathery ("Reversal of Platonic Eros in Petronius' 'Tale of the Pergamene Boy'") treats another case of inversion, bringing together Gordon's and Leitao's philosophic and structuralist threads; a comparison of Petronius's Eumolpus as adult philosopher to the Socrates of Plato's Symposion and of the Pergamene boy to his Alcibiades clarifies Petronius's creative use of parody in defining male homoerotic desire and an easily upturned definition of masculinity.
Hans-Friedrich Mueller "(Chastening Male Desire in the Age of Tiberius") locates the origins of male performativity in the troubled transition from Roman republic to empire; here, erotic desire is replaced by a rhetorical denial of desire, by chastity, which, as a desired trait, functions as a conflation of the structuralist polarity of desire and denial. It is also clear, too, that such a definition of the male dislocates all identities of the female outside it, eschewing, and thereby appropriating, all feminine desires, performances, and ambiguities/ambivalences in their denial.
The organizer will chair the session, introduce the speakers and moderate the discussions; after each paper (15 minutes each), there will be a short session (5-10 minutes) for questions and discussion; and after the last paper, a general discussion.
Pam GORDON
University of Kansas
According to tradition, the philosopher Arcesilaus (3rd century BCE) was once asked why students from various schools can move to the Garden of Epicurus, but no Epicureans ever go over to the other schools. Arcesilaus replies: "Because men can become eunuchs, but eunuchs never become men" (Diogenes Laertius 4.43). Although recent scholarship has quoted this joke as an apt assessment of the alleged intellectual castration of the Epicurean philosopher, this paper shifts the focus to the gendering of the Epicurean male.
Concentrating on texts by Plutarch and Cicero (the two greatest champions of anti-Epicurean rhetoric), I treat Arcesilaus' quip as a fragment from an extensive anti-Epicurean discourse that relied heavily on the language of effeminacy and sexual deviance. After a brief survey of derogatory names for Epicureans (e.g. effeminates, eunuchs, kinaidologoi, pigs, prostitutes, and Phaeacians), I argue that in calling the Epicureans "womanish," hostile outsiders are not hurling a random insult. Rather, the vocabulary of anti-Epicurean polemic reveals that outsiders suspected that the Garden was profoundly subversive of traditional virility. Epicurean teachings about pleasure helped fuel this suspicion (the culture at large construed devotion to pleasure as a feminine vice), but also implicated are the most basic Epicurean attitudes toward honor, politics, education, war, and public life in general. In fact, the Epicurean critique of Greek and Roman society leaves few options for an anti-Epicurean discourse that does not impugn the virility of the Epicurean male.
Thus, this paper puts a high valuation on hostile assessments of Epicureanism but views them askance. My approach has affinities with Daniel Boyarin's claim that the Jewish "sissy" is not just an antisemitic stereotype but "an assertive historical product of Jewish culture" (Unheroic Conduct [Berkeley 1997] page 4). To paraphrase Boyarin: there is something correct -- although seriously misvalued -- in the persistent representation of the Epicurean man as a sort of woman. In examining the way the dominant culture describes the Epicurean as a deficient or aberrant male, I hope to suggest paths toward a recuperative history of the Garden; but also to cast some Epicurean light on the dominant Greek and Roman canons of masculinity.
Mark Anthony MASTERSON
University of Southern California
This paper considers the masculinity that the master's discourses accorded to the male slave and both how this masculinity functioned to stabilize the master's identity and its relation to ideas of the natural and unnatural in the ambient culture of the empire.
The situation was complex. The slave, whether male or female, was subject to more than one discourse. There were, for examples, the philosophic discourses that either insisted on the basic humanity of slaves (e.g., Seneca 47) or declared that a slave-like condition afflicted all -- all, senator to slave, were subject to greater forces (e.g., Epictetus 4.1). But these discourses show only one general approach to slaves. I extract another discourse, one that is in more harmony with practice, from Roman law. In the Digest 1.5.4, I find a most telling contrast. Freedom is defined as a natural ability (naturalis facultas) that enables one to do what one would like, while slavery is "a 'regulating' by the law of the nations" (constitutio iuris gentium) whereby someone is subject to another's rule against nature (contra naturam).
The master's masculinity (featuring the panoply of rights and abilities that accrue to an actual or potential pater familias) has ease and nature on its side. Various terms that can be associated with the free -- ingenuus, genitor, or natura (from nascor) -- show that the free class, at an etymological level, can be seen as coming into being through the workings of nature. Indeed, the master receives the master signifier, the phallus, by nature. His freedom to do as he would like, as free and male, is stunning by twentieth century standards. The only thing that is denied to him is passive anal pleasure.
Where the slave is concerned, at times it appears that he is a free person who has been unfortunate. At other times, it appears that the slave, as a lesser type of person, actually exists. The slave, at any rate, is the storehouse of all the things the master as a vir is not. He is liable to penetration, etc. The slave does not receive the phallus by nature. He is denied it by ius gentium. The actual bodies and minds of the free and slave men seem to signify differently at times (cf. "mental illness", Digest 21.1.10).
It appears that the slave, with his attenuated masculinity and his other character flaws (which at times seem induced by the institution and at other times seem immanent), deserves his position. The nature of systems of meaning to create oppositions that define each other strengthens the power of this subordination -- as the master is natural and at his ease, so the slave exists in a conflicted state. The male slave is the "unnatural" that defines the master's "natural." Another way: the master colonizes the concept of natural with the terminology that references him: ingenuus, genitor, naturalis facultas, etc. The slave, on the other hand is cast out of Eden, as it were, into a conflicted state that is created through the workings of man's culture against nature. The master's discourse, in effect, conflates nature and culture when it is to the master's benefit, and draws a distinction when it is not. The slave male is controlled and inhibited by the system -- he is an unnatural creature who is prevented (at the level of ideology) from complete male functioning due to his being subject to the ius gentium. The master's identity, additionally, has a nice clear border.
David D. LEITAO
San Francisco State University
One of the most important ways in which "men's culture" defines itself is in opposition to "women's culture." And these boundaries between men and women are perhaps never articulated as clearly as when they are crossed. The images of the eunuch, androgyne, kinaidos, hermaphrodite, etc. all meditate on the nature and integrity of the divide that separates the sexes, even as they violate certain areas along that divide. This paper focuses on yet another type of boundary-crosser, and one which raises explicitly political questions, and that is the pregnant male. I will not be interested in the mythical or philosophical deployments of this theme, or of instances of the couvade (a private custom whereby a man, when his wife has given birth, replaces the mother in childbed and observes the tabus associated with it) which have been attributed by ancient writers to a number of cultures on the edge of the Greco-Roman world.
This paper focuses instead on a public ritual performed annually within the cult of Aphrodite and Ariadne in the Cypriot city of Amathous, in which a single young man "lies down and wails and does whatever things women in labor do" (Plut., Thes. 20). Plutarch, our only source, explains the ritual by reference to a local Cypriot myth associated with Theseus and Ariadne. The two were approaching the coast of Attica on their journey from Crete when a storm carried them to Cyprus. The pregnant Ariadne disembarked but Theseus sailed back out to sea in order to "help" the ship. So it fell to the local women of Amathous to attend to Ariadne and encourage her, which they did by, for example, bringing in "forged letters" from Theseus. But Ariadne died without having given birth, and when Theseus returned, he inaugurated the ritual of the young man's birth mimicry in her honor.
This paper will not attempt to reconstruct the ritual and situate it within the larger context of Cypriot religion (a worthwhile endeavor, but impossible given the time constraints of the session), but will focus rather on how the myth and the ritual conspire to replace the pregnant female with a pregnant male. (Why, after all, shouldn't a young Amathousian woman "complete" Ariadne's labor in the ritual?) Part of the strategy is to assert a presence for the male in a process from which he was ordinarily excluded. The myth exaggerates Theseus' absence from Ariadne's labor (it insists on his being away "helping" the ship while the women of Amathous "help" her) in order both to dramatize this exclusion and to show that women fail to give birth successfully in the absence of the male.
But in the ritual, which the myth purports to explain, the male does not join the parturient female, but replaces her. The young man completes Ariadne's labor; Ariadne herself disappears. This suggests that it is not only that men wished to be included in the parturition process, but that they wished also to experience the magical feeling of plenitude in their own bodies. But the tracks of this fantasy are partially obscured. For example, instead of enacting the pleasure of plenitude (i.e., pregnancy), the young man acts out the pain associated with parturition. Similarly, the young man in the ritual must surely be playing the role of Theseus, and yet the myth is careful not to identify the two explicitly. Finally, the potential fantasy of all men to experience their bodies as parturient bodies (all fathers do so in those cultures where the "true" couvade is practiced) is displaced, in the city of Amathous, onto a single ritual actor who performs a birth mimicry once a year, and the disidentification is further promoted by having him be a "youth" rather than an adult man. I think that what motivates these displacements is the difficulty in imagining a male body which can give birth without ceasing to be male. So the myth and ritual at Amathous need to do more than enact an appropriation; they need also to promote enough "misrecognition" to keep the effeminizing aspects of the male birth fantasy from overwhelming the empowering aspects.
Hans-Friedrich MUELLER
University of Florida, Tallahassee
This paper surveys male chastity (pudicitia) and male desire (libido) in the historical anecdotes of Valerius Maximus, and places these anecdotes in the context of Augustan moral legislation and religious reforms as well as in the context of later imperial developments. In Valerius we shall discover an ideology that reigns in, stigmatizes, and chastens male desire, a veritable literary culture war that enlists not only the arsenal of silver Latin rhetoric, but also traditional Roman religion, Caesar worship, and a reinterpreted history of the Republic in full sympathy with the contemporary moral agenda.
Roman greatness, one recalls, had been founded, beginning with Lucretia, on the chastity of its female citizens (cf. Val. Max. 1.1.1). Military failure could be, and sometimes was, blamed on the unchastity of Vestal priestesses. Cicero believed chastity as important as life and liberty (De part. orat. 86.4-5). Valerius too views lust as positively inimical to the Roman state; it is the source of plagues, civil instability, and war (4.3. init.). Such an attitude is traditionally Roman. In Valerius, however, we also find an unprecedented focus on male chastity. He praises Germanicus as a "one-woman-man" who confined his usus Veneris to his wife (4.4.3). Of the sixteen anecdotes in Valerius' chapter dedicated to pudicitia (6.1), six involve males only and fourteen of them view males as criminal. Spurinna disfigures himself so that he will arouse no lust (4.5.ext.1). Valerius expresses gratitude that the gods did not allow the Germans defeated by Marius to imitate Roman chastity (6.1.ext.3). Again and again, male sexual behavior is problematic. Is Valerius alone? Reflection on the marriage laws of Augustus, the ensuing protest, and subsequent trials will quickly demonstrate that male citizens had become subject to novel constra ints (cf. Baltrusch, Regimen morum). Corroborative evidence for the growing importance of male chastity may also be found in later imperial numismatic propaganda. Hadrian, for example, extolled himself as pudicus on his coins (Mattingly, CREBM, 2.356 no. 135). Subsequent emperors likewise advertise their devotion to Pudicitia. Christian authors like Tertullian will of course also take up the call for male chastity. Nevertheless, Valerius anticipates this later imperial de votion, and does so within the context of classical religion.
Pudicitia is in fact not just a virtue, but a god as well, a god in possession of a numen that inhabits the hearth of Vesta, the pulvinaria of Juno, the child-getting couch of Tiberius' mother, and the entire household of the Caesars (6.1.init.). This god and the other divinities associated with Pudicitia have the power to enforce chastity's demands. Violators meet a variety of terrible fates at the hands of divine forces, thus lending religious support to this moral value. Indeed, Valerius reserves his greatest indignation for those who sacrifice religious values for illicit sex (9.1.7). Nevertheless, after determining the importance of male chastity to the well-being of the Roman state and its enforcement by both traditio nal and Caesarian gods, we shall also establish what male chastity requires. Valerian chastity is not Tertullian. Crimina libidinis are confined to illicit sexual relations with Roman citizens. Male sex with male slaves, for example, arouses no condemnation (cf., e.g., 8.1.abs.12, 9.12.8).
We find in Valerius a wide variety of male desires. These desires are, however, subject to the rhetorical sanctions and moral lessons of law, religion, and history. Valerius thus marks an important phase in the construction of licit male desire between Republican Rome and pagan Rome's religious successors.
Daniel B. McGLATHERY
Ball State University
Michel Foucault's discussion of "erotics" and "true love" in his Use of Pleasure (Parts IV and V) has several interesting implications for the literary interpretation of Petronius' Satyricon, particularly for the Milesian tale of Pergamene boy (chapters 85-87). In the first part of this paper, I demonstrate the ways in which Petronius recognizes and yets subverts the Platonic ideal of pederasty discussed by Foucault. The step-by-step attempts by the debauched poet Emolpus to seduce the Per gamene boy with the promise of gifts, together with the boy's surprisingly aggressive response to these advances, parody both the conventional and Platonic stylization of homoerotic courtship that Foucault discusses. The parody of Platonic norms receives sharp reinforcement from the sequence of events in "The Pergamene Boy," which help to present the tale as an inversion of the attempted seduction narrated by Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. In the latter dialogue, Socrates' denial of sexual inti macy forces Alcibiades, who by age and position should play the role of an eromenos ("beloved"), into that of an erastes ("lover"). Foucault cites Socrates' restraint as the supreme example of the self-mastery of the philosopher, who "will turn the game upside down, reverse the roles, establish the principle of a renunciation of the aphrodisia, and become, for all men who are eager for truth, an object of love." In the Satyricon, as we shall see, Eumolpus merely poses as a ph ilosopher in order to seduce the Pergamene boy, playing the conventional role of erastes until, to his surprise, the boy turns out to be more sexually aggressive than Eumolpus had expected. Thus, the boy ends up playing the role of Alcibiades to Eumolpus' Socrates. Foucault's notion of the reciprocity and reversibility of power relations proves useful for a discussion of this reversal of roles.
In the Platonic idealization discussed by Foucault in Part V of The Use of Pleasure, Alcibiades and Socrates are driven to desire by a love of truth, and whereas the more conventional lovers of Xenophon's Symposium are motivated by a love of honor and legitimate socio-political rewards, Eumolpus and the Pergamene boy seek mere sexual pleasure and material advantage. Although their courtship, with its careful sequence of meeting places, trysts, and exchanges of gifts, retains the elaborate stylization of Platonic or conventional homoerotic love, and even a veneer of philosophical earnestness, the motives of the lovers in our tale are much baser than those advocated in Greek philosophy. When the tutor proves anything but chaste, and when the pupil violates convention by, in Foucault's words, "accepting too many tokens of love, and ... granting his favors heedlessly and out of self-interest, without testing the [moral and social] worth of his partner," this exposure of the realities of peder astic relations threatens to undermine the premises of the Greek philosophical problematization of homoerotic pleasure.
In part two of my paper, I briefly assess the validity of Foucault's claim, in The Care of the Self, that pederasty experiences a "deproblematization" in the literature of the Roman era. He argues that when reflection on the love of boys appears, it serves to reactivate classical culture "in a dull way" and "has a facile, repetitive sound." In so doing, he must explain away the entire genre of the Roman novel by dubiously terming Petronius and Apuleius exceptional in their privileging of pederasty. Foucault also laments a lack of "seriousness" in texts of the Roman era, but fails to recognize that the ironic and parodic manipulation of Platonic erotics does not indicate a diminution, but rather an increase, in creative thinking about homoerotic matters. His remarks indicate that he subscribes to a limited view of parody as a derivative exercise, a petty or pejorative imitation of an original, rather than a creative and fertile artistic response. As will become clear, Foucault's thesis that a significant shift occurred from an intense preoccupation with pederasty in fourth century BCE Greece to a valorization of marriage in the Roman empire of the first and second centuries CE does not hold up under scrutiny of either the pseudo-philosophical texts of the Second Sophistic which Foucault himself analyzes in Part Six ("Boys") or such Latin authors as Catullus and Martial, whom he fails to discuss.