Sexing the World

Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

Anthony Corbeill

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400852468
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender—masculine eyes ( oculi ), feminine trees ( arbores ), neuter bodies ( corpora ). Sexing the World surveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite.Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as "dust" ( pulvis ) or "tree bark" ( cortex ). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories. Sexing the World contributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.

Chapter 1

Roman Scholars on Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex

[Francis I, on improving diplomatic relations between France and Switzerland]

—I’ll pay Switzerland the honour of standing godfather for my next child.

—Your majesty, said the minister, in so doing, would have all the grammarians in Europe upon your back; Switzerland, as a republick, being a female, can in no construction be godfather.

—She may be godmother, replied Francis, hastily—so announce my intentions by a courier to-morrow morning.

(Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, vol. 4, ch. 21)¹

Sterne offers here a transparent play on the relationship between grammatical gender and biological sex. Names of countries, regularly gendered feminine in the Romance languages, accordingly take on the features of females in both visual representations and the imaginings of native speakers. Just as it would have been unthinkable for a Roman artist to portray the personified city Roma as a man, so too does Francis’s minister identify the king’s proposal to make Switzerland a godfather as grammatically impossible. Two assumptions underlying this exchange will inform the following chapter: first, that to equate biological sex with grammatical gender marks a natural and self-evident move; second, that those who busy themselves with the study of grammar have strong opinions regarding the historical validity of this first assumption.

INTRODUCTION

I shall echo the practice of the ancient grammarians by beginning with one of their preferred research methods: etymology. The earliest extant attempt to locate the origins of the Latin word for grammatical gender, genus, dates to the late Republic. Varro derives the noun from the verb generare “to beget,” since genders “are only those things that give birth” (Varro frg. 245 Funaioli: Varro ait genera tantum illa esse quae generant). As is the case with most of his etymologies, Varro does not simply appeal to metaphor here, but he envisions words as organic bodies with a life of their own.² Concordant with that life is the ability to age, die, and give birth to related word forms. Unlike many other aspects of Varronian grammatical theory, this etymology comes to wield significant influence as it reverberates throughout the lexicographical and grammatical traditions. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae lists nine direct citations, and a number of additional allusions can be found in ancient commentaries and scholia.³ This scholarly tradition will continue to offer more explicit examples of the ways in which grammatical gender allows words themselves to participate in a biology of sexual reproduction. And yet, while modern scholars confirm Varro’s conclusion that the word genus is related to the notion of creation and procreation, they do not consider why this finding holds sway over the subsequent grammatical tradition. I intend in this book to identify some of the sources for this fascination with reproducing genders.

Exploring what grammatical gender meant in ancient Rome requires both patient philology and an openness to the theoretical possibilities of the ways in which sex and gender are able to coexist. The philological aspect derives from the fact that, in the absence of any full discussion of fluid gender in Latin,⁴ my research has entailed poring through the corpus of the Roman grammarians and cataloguing the several hundred instances of nouns with variable gender and the opinions expressed about them by both ancient and modern commentators. At the same time, this apparently unprocessed material provides much room for theoretical extrapolation: I hope to demonstrate how the ancient conceptualizing of grammatical gender offers an attractive model through which to understand aspects of human sexuality and constructed social gender. This chapter concludes with the suggestion that the choices that the Romans made in essentializing the concept of grammatical gender—that is, positing origins from nature that correspond with the workings of biological sex—form part of a heterosexualization of the world. This creation of a grammatical world of “compulsory heterosexuality,” as recent critics have put it, shapes in turn the treatment of human sex and gender throughout Roman antiquity. In subsequent chapters, I intend to outline how this kind of essentializing of gender takes place in other areas of Roman culture as well, from poetry to religion to political attitudes toward the human hermaphrodite.

If one were to ask of a modern linguist the formulaic question of the Latin grammarians, “Genus quid est?” (“What is gender?”), the response would be something like the following:

Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words.⁵

This standard linguistic definition of gender is strictly formalist, in much the way that we might classify in English those nouns that form their plurals by adding the letter “s” (one cat / two cats) separately from those that do so through the change of an internal vowel sound (one mouse / two mice). The Latin grammarians demonstrate an awareness of this type of formalism, often presenting nouns in conjunction with a pronoun (e.g., hic vir, huius viri, etc.); in this practice the “associated word” (in this case a form of the pronoun hic), demonstrates gender independently from the morphology of the noun itself (e.g., Varro ling. 9.41). As should even now be clear, however, I am interested less in the morphology of nouns than in the semantic connotations of their grammatical gender: how native speakers of Latin conceived of the categories of “masculine” or “feminine” or, in many cases, the category “neither of these” (that is, neuter).

The modern scholarly definition of gender given above, if strictly applied, implies that a word unaccompanied by an associated adjective or pronoun has no gender in that particular context. The elasticity of this definition proves especially useful for hybrid nouns such as the German Mädchen (“girl”). Although formally neuter, semantic grounds frequently prompt native speakers, in informal contexts, to use the feminine pronoun sie (“she”) when referring back to the neuter noun.⁶ An analogous hybrid common in English is the word “baby.” In most cases, of course, the pronouns “she” or “he” are applied according to the child’s sex, but the alternative neuter pronoun “it” is often used by those for whom the semantic fact of the baby’s sex is not essential (e.g., those who are not the baby’s parents). This contest between semantics and lexical choice is also a feature of Latin. The phenomenon appears particularly often in Roman comedy, in apparent imitation of Greek models. The comic playwright Terence, for example, describes a young lover, Pamphilus, addressing his girlfriend as mea Glycerium (“my Glycerium”). Since Glycerium’s biological sex is undoubtedly important to him, Pamphilus uses the feminine adjective mea to describe her despite the fact that it formally disagrees with the neuter gender of her proper name.⁷ As the fourth-century commentator Donatus remarks on another passage of Terence, Pamphilus has here “rendered the form that corresponds with [the noun’s] meaning” rather than adhered to strict grammatical categories (Don. Ter. Eun. 302.2: declinationem ad intellectum rettulit). The occurrence of analogous gender changes in inscriptions shows that the desire to match grammar and biology extended beyond the comic stage. The nouns delicium and deliciae (“sweetie”) function in Latin as terms of endearment for a single male or female beloved, normally young, despite the fact that the nouns are respectively neuter singular and feminine plural. As happens in Terence, however, meaning can take precedence over grammar: the masculine and feminine singular forms delicius and delicia occasionally surface in order to correspond more closely with the physical reality of the boy or girl so designated (e.g., ILS 7668, 9346).⁸ None of these examples of hybrid nouns, from modern Germany to ancient Rome, will occasion much surprise. Each refers to an animate being whose biological sex prompts the violation of strict rules of agreement. As we shall see, however, speakers and writers in Rome could extend this practice to so-called inanimate words as well, words that would seem to have no sexual characteristics. It was simply necessary that these variations in gender had sufficient authority (auctoritas) to back up the change. I will touch upon the nature of this peculiar authority in the final section of this chapter, and treat it more fully in the following chapter on the use of grammatical gender among Roman poets.

Grammatical gender can be found in many disparate language groups—not just in Indo-European, but in two-thirds of surviving African languages, as well as in several hundred of the native families spoken in Australia and New Guinea.⁹ The major Asiatic families and most indigenous North American languages provide the principal exceptions to the prevalence of gender categories. Among several Indo-European languages with gender, including Latin, there are three active genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—while in others various additions to and modifications of these categories exist. Most Romance languages, such as French and Italian, have lost neuter forms, while in English the only significant expression of gender that survives is in the third-person personal pronouns, where the singular forms “he,” “she,” and “it” normally denote biological sex or, in the case of “it,” the lack thereof. This chapter concentrates on nouns in Latin, and in order to maintain focus on the sex and gender equation, I will follow the Varronian tradition in restricting my examples principally to nouns with the ability to procreate: that is, those identified in the extant Latin material as normally masculine and feminine.¹⁰

Some nouns belong to intuitive gender categories. For example, the commonest Latin word for “man”—vir—is masculine and those for “woman”—femina and mulier—are feminine. But beyond such clear cases, matters frequently become less intuitive and even utterly baffling. The male eagle, aquila, is designated only by the first-declension female form, and the commonest vulgar term for the female genitalia, cunnus, is masculine, while that for the penis, mentula, is feminine. When presented with cases such as these, the temptation to reconstruct situations in which gender assignment makes a particular point about sexualities is nearly irresistible. And indeed on a broader level, scholars have made various attempts to explain the assignment of words to specific gender categories as indicative of some sort of systematic view of how each element of the external world possesses or reflects discernible sexual characteristics. Perhaps the most ambitious example of this quest for systematization is that of Jacob Grimm (1785–1863, best known today as one of the Brothers Grimm). Grimm famously attempted to explain the assignment of gender to non-animate nouns in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) through, among other things, a comparison of the various daughter languages.¹¹ Grimm posited that grammatical gender originated in the practice of the earliest speakers of PIE, who personified all the inanimate objects of the world, deeming “masculine” those with harsh and active qualities, while the things denoted by “feminine” nouns were characterized by passive traits such as gentleness and softness. As time progressed, Grimm argued, these associations were largely forgotten, but traces remained in the survival of gender categories.

Although Grimm’s conclusions remained popular for several decades, constructing such a worldview for societies deep in prehistory must inevitably lead to special pleading, and the categories constructed likely reveal as much about the way the researcher organizes his or her own world as about the belief-system of early speakers of a given language. One can imagine the heady atmosphere that must have prevailed in Grimm’s day, when the notion of a Proto-Indo-European language was first raised; the headiness, indeed, spawned much wild speculation. Rampant enthusiasm over reconstructing the earliest sta...