Sex

Antiquity and Its Legacy

Daniel Orrells

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848855199
• eBook ISBN: 9780857739506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sex is fundamental to society. We cannot think about politics, power, identity or culture without also thinking about sexuality. Despite this, the scientific study of sexual behaviour is a relatively recent phenomenon. Doctors, legal experts and other intellectuals have all pondered challenging questions in an attempt to stay abreast of the latest sexual research. How might we separate talking about sex scientifically from discussing and consuming pornography? How do we speak objectively about desire and pleasure? And how do the words that we use to talk about sex affect what we are able to say about it? Such questions increasingly inform public discourse across a variety of media. Showing how ancient words and ideas have left a significant imprint on present-day ideas about sex, Daniel Orrells offers a bold new narrative of how the scientific study of sexuality came into being.
Uncovering the intriguing story of how the obscene and erotic verse of Roman epigram and love poetry became the sanitised language of nineteenth-century sexual science, this divertingly readable book demonstrates how the reception of both Latin and Greek texts was central to the development of modernmsexology and psychoanalysis. Ranging from Sappho, Catullus and Martial to Michel Foucault, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, the author reveals just how profoundly classics has shaped the landscape of sexual identity that we inhabit today.

CHAPTER I

SEX, LATIN AND RENAISSANCE HUMANISM: ‘A PRECIOUS STONE IN A PILE OF DUNG’

Between 1425 and 1426, a young and hopeful law student produced a couple of books of seemingly obscene and dirty poetry, which he entitled The Hermaphrodite. The man in question, Antonio Beccadelli (1394–1471), originally from Palermo, Sicily, penned his verses with the aim of attracting the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. Copies were made and the nature of the poetry quickly ensured its rapid dissemination through humanist circles. Despite Beccadelli’s explicit allusions to classical writers – the Roman poets Catullus and Martial in particular (to whom we will return) – and despite some clever jokes (as we shall soon see), Beccadelli’s attempts seriously backfired. The sexually explicit contents of the book jarred awkwardly with other humanists’ fulminations against illicit sexual desires, and the door to the de’ Medici court remained firmly closed. Friends of Beccadelli’s jumped in to help; eventually various recommendations paid off and he was appointed court poet to Duke Filippo Maria Visconti on 10 December 1429. By late 1434 he had entered the service of King Alfonso V of Aragon and Naples as counsellor and confidant. At last, in Palermo at Alfonso’s court, Beccadelli flourished, presiding over a grand group of scholars. In 1455 he wrote a book about Alfonso’s deeds, as would befit any court poet, and he also founded the Academia Neapolitana, which continues to this day.¹

Back in the late 1420s, however, the youthful Beccadelli was gaining notoriety for his lewd book. Bernadino da Siena, a well-known Franciscan preacher, staged public burnings of the work in Milan, Bologna and Ferrara. Beccadelli was burned twice in effigy. One humanist said that he was a ‘pimp for boys’, and the Pope, Eugenius IV (Pope 1431–47) apparently threatened any reader of The Hermaphrodite with excommunication. The anecdote about Cardinal Cesarini (1398–1444) is also worth remembering. One day, he found his secretary reading it. The priest tried to hide it but the cardinal confronted him, making him destroy it. But he also remarked, ‘If you had known how to respond, perhaps you wouldn’t have had to tear it up. What you should have answered me was that you were searching for a precious stone in a pile of dung’.² The cardinal’s witticism reflected how it was not clear to Italian humanists how one was to respond to ancient representations of sex and desire. It was not until 1559 that an Index of Forbidden Books was established by Pope Paul IV. And the difficulty of knowing how to read Greek and Latin texts was also reflected in a 1563 decree of the Council of Trent (the sixteenth-century council of the Roman Catholic Church) which stated:

Books which professedly deal with, narrate or teach things lascivious or obscene are absolutely prohibited, since not only the matter of faith but also that of morals, which are usually easily corrupted through the reading of books, must be taken into consideration, and those who possess them are to be severely punished by the bishops. Ancient books written by the heathens may by reason of their elegance and quality of style be permitted, but by no means read to children.³

Precisely what might be learnt from reading sex in classical Latin verse was open to debate in the 1400s, a debate provoked partly by Beccadelli’s book. If Cesarini’s secretary had known what to say about the book, then there would have been no problem reading it. So how did The Hermaphrodite pose such tricky questions about what it meant for a humanist to know about sex?

The difficulty of reading epigrams

Cardinal Cesarini’s witticism reveals the complicated intellectual environment in which The Hermaphrodite was written in the first half of the fifteenth century. The classical canon was still far from set, as new works were still being discovered in libraries around the Mediterranean world. And the discovery of Catullus in the early 1300s and his reception in the 1400s reflected the difficulties facing Renaissance humanist scholars and writers: only one manuscript had survived into the Renaissance period, making the text difficult to get hold of. Furthermore, the text itself was notoriously corrupt; meters were confused and poems were run together, and the point of the poem was often lost. As Julia Haig Gaisser has shown, Catullus was very hard to read.⁴ On top of these problems, Catullus’ short poems seemed full of obscenity. What was a humanist to make of such writing? One of the issues that reflected the Renaissance response to Catullus was how to interpret Lesbia’s sparrow in Poem 2, where Catullus describes Lesbia’s affectionate relationship with her pet passer. The poet Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503), a friend of Beccadelli, wrote a poem ‘Ad pueros de columba’ (in 1457) which evoked Catullus’ kissing-poems, running allusions to Martial 11.6 into it, which had interpreted the sparrow as not a bird but a penis. A deluge of poems about sparrows, doves and kisses followed. And, in 1489, Angelo Poliziano, the Florentine classical scholar and poet, famously argued in his Miscellanea, a collection of short essays on classical texts, that ‘that sparrow of Catullus [. . .] allegorically conceals a certain more obscene meaning which I cannot explain with my modesty intact’. Poliziano then quoted Martial 11.6: ‘Give me kisses, but Catullan ones. / And if they be as many as he said, / I will give you Catullus’s sparrow’.⁵ The question as to whether there was a penis in his text was not simply an amusing intellectual skirmish but an issue of real scholarly debate well into the sixteenth century. Catullus’ text focused his Renaissance readers’ attention on the relationship between the poet’s words and the poet’s body.

When Renaissance writers and scholars wanted to justify their interest in the obscenity of Catullus, they were able to turn to Catullus’ own rationalisation for rude verse, which questioned the very relationship between the poet’s sexual self – his own feelings – and the language he used in his poetry:

For it is proper for a pious poet to be chaste

himself, but it is not at all necessary for his little verses to be (16.5–6).

And yet the poem (Catullus 16) from which these lines come, shows that Catullus’ argument was hardly straightforward:

I will fuck your ass [pedicabo] and I will fuck your mouth [irrumabo]

Aurelius you pussyhole and Furius you fairy

you who think because my verses

are a bit soft that I have no shame.

For it is proper for a pious poet to be chaste

himself, but it is not at all necessary for his little verses to be.

Actually these have wit and charm

And if they are a little soft and a bit shameless

and can make someone tingle a bit

– I don’t mean in boys, but in those hairy old men,

who can’t get it up.

You, who of my many thousands of kisses

have read, do you think I’m less of a man?

I will fuck your ass and I will fuck your mouth.

The relationship between the Catullan text and Catullus’ own sex life comes under ironic scrutiny. The aggressive invective that opens this poem spotlights the power of the poet’s voice to represent, by violating his addressee’s mouth. As William Fitzgerald has pointed out, ‘the mouth in Roman culture was the most important site of purity or contamination: eating, speaking, and kissing – the latter as much a social as a sexual activity – all required a pure mouth, but above all speaking, for the Roman’s word was sacred’.⁶ The verb that Catullus uses, irrumare, means ‘to put the penis into the mouth’ (as opposed to pedicare, meaning ‘to put the penis in the ass’). The act of irrumatio, Fitzgerald says, ‘becomes a figure for the poet’s power to assign his own meanings to those who, perforce, are silent while he speaks’.⁷ Catullus’ verbal threat reflects the Roman conceptualisation of sex as a relationship of power and authority, whereby the free-born adult male asserts his position and status over those inferior to him.⁸

But, at the same time, Catullus’ poetic voice was also self-ironising and self-questioning, as his claim to authority over the language he uses is undercut by his own authorititative language. The poem is suspended in paradox: Catullus states that his readers should distinguish between the man and his poem, in a poem where he threatens to rape anally and orally free-born Roman men. As Daniel Selden has put it, ‘if the poet is actually virtuous and chaste, he will never carry out the rape, and, if he carries out the rape, he substantiates the claims against his morals’.⁹ Just as Aurelius and Furius had apparently questioned Catullus’ masculinity, so Catullus’ response has us wonder how disgusting or how pleasurable these acts of irrumatio and pedicatio actually are for Catullus. Catullus’ poem blurs disgust with lust, repulsion with seduction. Is this the language of obscene punishment or a cover for sexual pleasure? And we, the readers, are left wondering how ironically knowing we are to imagine Catullus was in using this language. How confidently assertive, cleverly self-mocking or transparently insecure is Catullus to seem here? With how much authority does Catullus use the words pedicabo and irrumabo?

Beccadelli’s The Hermaphrodite emerged at this intellectually turbulent time when not just getting a grasp on Catullus’ meaning was difficult, but also simply getting hold of Catullus’ text. As Beccadelli put it:

I’m on fire [ardeo], my dear Galeazzo, to find wanton Catullus

So I can gratify my mistress.

The lusty lass loves to read the tender poets,

And she prefers your verses, learned Catullus,

And just now she sweetly asked me for them with many a prayer,

Thinking that her favorite poet was perhaps in my house.

‘I don’t have the book,’ I said, ‘my light, my nymph.

But I’ll make sure I do. Perhaps you’ll get the work.’

She insists and asks me for the friendly book constantly,

And treats me to dire threats.

Wherefore, by all the gods, dear friend

(may Cytherea be just as kind to your prayers)

I beg you again and again: find this book for me

So that I can make myself more pleasing to my goddess (Hermaphrodite 2.23)¹⁰

Renaissance readers’ desire to get hold of Catullus’ scarce and corrupt text became focused on the issue of understanding Catullus’ bodily desires behind the words he put on the page. In Beccadelli’s poem, the desire for the text – the desire to get hold of his text – becomes the desire to get beyond the text in order to have sex with his girlfriend. And yet, it is impossible to have sex without Catullus’ text, implies Beccadelli: he ‘burns’ (ardeo) for Catullus just as much as his mistress.

If knowing how to have sex meant knowing how to read Catullus, then this meant knowing about the language of sex, pleasure and desire. The opening poem of The Hermaphrodite reiterated Catullus’ defence of obscene poetry (1.1.5–8), alerting his reader’s attention to his command over the Latin language. But, as Catullus had blurred the line between giving offence and giving pleasure, between seduction and violation, so The Hermaphrodite was to please and displease in equal measure, as its poems confronted its readers with the question of what they were to make of the sexual vocabulary of the Latin language. As he explained the title of the book:

Our book has at the same time a cunt [cunnus] and a cock [mentula]

so how very fitting [conveniens] a name it has! (1.3.3–4)

The conveniens nomen is not just suitable but obscenely alludes to the act of sexual coition itself: cunnus and mentula coming together. This text isn’t simply about sex – it is sex! Beccadelli continues:

But if you call it ‘Ass’ [podicem] because it sings with its ass,

it will still have a not unfitting [non inconveniens] name (1.3.5–6).

The Hermaphrodite will offend any reader and please any sort of desire. It will seduce and insult in equal measure. As a mentula, it will assault; as a cunnus or podex, it will provide pleasure. At the end of his book, Beccadelli sends his ‘little book’ straight into the whorehouse where ‘futues et futuere’, where it will fuck and be fucked (2.37.32), exemplifying the ambivalent and even belligerent relationship that this book will have with its readers: some will be turned on by it (The Hermaphrodite as cunnus and podex), whereas others will feel assaulted by its invective mood (The Hermaphrodite as mentula). Beccadelli’s book confronts the reader with the possibilities of their responses to its poetry, asking them to think about how they react to its language: offended and assaulted, tickled and pleasured? Just as Catullus had both loved and hated (‘Odi et amo . . .’ 85.1), so The Hermaphrodite blurred the line – questioned the difference – between sex and violence, beauty and the grotesque, the licit and the illicit. Beccadelli might have been worried about the ‘thousand Catos [. . .] a thousand who only like serious reading’ (2.35.3–4), but he knew that these critics were ‘rigid’ (‘censore . . . rigido’), both lusty and disgusted. Beccadelli asked of his humanist readers what was to be made of the language of sex in Lat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword (by Phiroze Vasunia)
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Sex, Latin and Renaissance Humanism: ‘A Precious Stone In A Pile of Dung’
• Chapter II: The Satyra Sotadica and The Erotics Of Latinity
• Chapter III: Sexual Enlightenment? From Archaeology To Science
• Chapter IV: Sexology, Historicism and Ancient Greece
• Chapter V: From The Tribad To Sappho
• Chapter VI: Freud’s Classical Mythology
• Some Suggestions For Further Reading
• Notes