A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities

Thomas K. Hubbard, Thomas K. Hubbard

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118610688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire ancienne et classique

A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities presents a comprehensive collection of original essays relating to aspects of gender and sexuality in the classical world.

• Views the various practices and discursive contexts of sexuality systematically and holistically
• Discusses Greece and Rome in each chapter, with sensitivity to the continuities and differences between the two classical civilizations
• Addresses the classical influence on the understanding of later ages and religion
• Covers artistic and literary genres, various social environments of sexual conduct, and the technical disciplines of medicine, magic, physiognomy, and dream interpretation
• Features contributions from more than 40 top international scholars

Part I

Approaches

Chapter 1

Feminist Theory

Marilyn B. Skinner

Assigning a chapter on feminism to lead off a Companion to Ancient Sexuality is a politically generous gesture, for which the editor earns my thanks. Many readers of this volume will recall the “sexuality wars” of the 1990s, which split progressive classicists into two acrimonious factions, with noxious effects on scholarly investigation and, worse, on collegiality. It is conventional to designate the opposing sides “feminist and Foucauldian” and to characterize the debate as a feminist attack on the paradigm of ancient sexuality popularized by Michel Foucault and his followers.¹ However, that depiction is arguably reductionist, for it simplifies positions and overlooks many efforts made by participants to nuance and explain them. While attempting to mediate, I presented a detailed résumé of the basic issues; thus it seems unnecessary to do so again.² In the following chapter, my primary aim is to move beyond last century's disputes to point to an emerging synthesis of feminist gender analysis and Foucauldian-inspired discursive critique, which is poised to illuminate striking new aspects of Greek and Roman erotic life.

One further consideration should be noted before I leave the subject of the sexuality wars. The controversy has imparted a painful lesson to all concerned about the relative accuracy of Foucault's own observations on “regimes of truth.” In a 1977 interview—one of the key chapters in Power/Knowledge—he speaks of la vérité as “a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements” that is “linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it” (Foucault 1980, 133). A “regime of truth” might be summarily described as a mechanism for weighing and affirming truth values. Classics as a discipline—a “collection of discursive practices” about ancient texts and material culture—fits the rubric perfectly (Hitchcock 2008, 129). Its gatekeeping procedures include mastering two learned languages and achieving rapid reading capacity in at least three modern vernaculars. Aspiring philologists must also demonstrate thorough knowledge of a range of literary texts and other kinds of primary evidence—inscriptions, papyrological remains, artifacts—that bear upon interpretation. Although less stiff than it once was, the expository prose of classics remains abstract and cerebral, an artificial idiom many students find hard to comprehend, much less manipulate. Most relevant to discussion here, a system of “citational politics” anchors contributions in progress to the past: “The heavily footnoted text upholds the tyranny of the discipline, which is kept in place by referencing a long genealogy of scholarly authority, a trope of homage to the ancestors of the discipline.”³ What is real knowledge, then, is what is cited with attribution; such “truth” has cleared all the hurdles imposed by a scheme of operations designed to screen out unwelcome hypotheses. Whatever the flaws in Foucault's reading of ancient history, his analysis of how ideas are validated academically was spot-on.

Of course, that is not the whole story: both Foucault's blueprint for knowledge production and my sketch of how it works in our own field are circumscribed models.⁴ Much seeps through the cracks, as the pervasive impact of feminism on classics itself shows. Accumulation of learning is not always conscious and deliberate. Crucial insights acquired through casual reading and conversation are often subliminally absorbed into a paradigm, without ascription, as the notional background to what is eventually postulated. Feminism, furthermore, has tempered disciplinary protocols, breaking down hierarchy by encouraging collaborative professional activities and by advocating the practice of anonymous peer review. Yet the authoritarian framework of classics blocked out above still runs counter to the egalitarian principles of feminist theory. Hence a chapter purporting to offer the definitive overview of a given field of feminist inquiry, in this case scholarship on ancient sexuality, might appear to be complicit in a Foucauldian “regime of truth.” Dogmatic pronouncements would be understandably resented by fellow feminist scholars, especially those whose contributions had been omitted. Let me stipulate, then, that there are many ways of framing the present narrative; what follows is just one.

In the Beginning

In the early 1970s, well before K. J. Dover and Michel Foucault produced their influential works, there was neither ancient sexuality nor gender studies—only “women in antiquity,” and little enough of that. With the first stirrings of second-wave feminism, classicists had begun to examine the evidence for ancient women's lives and to introduce undergraduate courses on the topic into the curriculum (McManus 1997, 14–15). Before those developments, treatment of sources was relatively unsophisticated; the positivist bent of classical scholarship insured that efforts were largely concerned with the amassing of Realien (Sullivan 1973a, 5–6; Blok 1987, 4–6). Now a new methodological self-awareness emerged. In December 1972, at the 104th annual meeting of the American Philological Association, a panel of papers on “Ancient Greek Women and Modern Criticism” chaired by Mary R. Lefkowitz dared to ask whether dismissive scholarly pronouncements on Sappho and epic heroines might be informed by present-day sex prejudice. The answer was a firm “yes.”

Two significant publications, a special issue of Arethusa edited by J. P. Sullivan in the spring of 1973 (Sullivan 1973b) and Sarah B. Pomeroy's groundbreaking social history Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (Pomeroy 1975), together established measures for dealing with admittedly lacunose data (McManus 1997, 15–19). This set of procedures increased scholarly sensitivity to atypical phenomena and encouraged closer questioning of documentation. When speaking of ancient women, for example, economic class and other determining factors had to be taken into account; the male-oriented nature of the evidence meant that primary and secondary sources required assessment of bias; dissenting views need not be excluded; cautious extrapolation might compensate for distortions or gaps in the record. “Women in antiquity” was beginning to organize itself as a distinct subfield. Once it had achieved proper methodological rigor and displayed its positivist credentials, it could be incorporated, with relatively few objections, into the discipline, though merely as a subfield. Its marginalized status was a direct consequence of the nineteenth-century historiographic assumption that women, relegated as they were to the domestic and biological spheres, were in a sense outside history (Blok 1987, 6–11).

From the outset, meanwhile, second-wave feminism had taken a keen interest in sexuality. Applying Simone de Beauvoir's thesis that sex was the distinction that established woman as Other and identified her with biology and the body (de Beauvoir 1974, xix, 3–41), radical feminists defined heterosexual relations, especially within the nuclear family, as a primary locus of oppression, vulnerable to searching critique.⁵ While most scholars working on Greek and Roman women did not associate themselves with a radical feminist position, they accepted the premise that investigation of sexuality was a legitimate part of a feminist approach to classical studies. Consequently such inquiries became one major element in treatments of ancient women. The 1973 special issue of Arethusa contained two essays on sexual topics. K. J. Dover's “Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior” (Dover 1973) attempts a basic, though necessarily restricted, explanation of protocols for Athenian citizens, male and female. Dorothea Wender's “Plato: Misogynist, Paedophile, and Feminist” seeks to resolve apparent paradoxes in Plato's philosophical attitudes toward women and is particularly interesting for its imaginative, if somewhat misguided, effort to recover the consciousness of a historical male figure presumed to be “homosexual” in orientation. Despite the lack of first-person evidence for women's private lives, Pomeroy included in her 1975 history not only prescriptions on women's sexual behavior but plausible speculation about how they might have satisfied their own desires and dealt with prostitution, infanticide, contraception, abortion, and enslaved sexual service as matter-of-fact realities for many women.

Revisiting Pomeroy's selective bibliography in the Arethusa special issue provides more insight into the perceived connection between women and sexuality as research subjects (Pomeroy 1973, 125–57). Classical Greece and Rome are allotted separate bibliographic surveys, each with a short listing of “erotic” materials. In the Greek section, written by David Schaps, three of the four items mentioned are largely concerned with pederasty (138). Even discussions of male homoerotic practices were therefore at home in the field. Pomeroy references only two books on Roman sexual mores, by Otto Kiefer (1934) and Pierre Grimal (1967) respectively. Although each devotes considerable attention to women, she cannot recommend them or other works of their kind without reservations (148). Her scruples are understandable. Popular accounts of Roman sexual life dwelt mainly on moralizing or satiric allegations of female misbehavior, happily accepting their sources' most remarkable claims at face value. One task of the feminist scholar was therefore to debunk that sensationalized picture of the “emancipated” Roman woman.

Feminist classical scholars were also drawn to Roman studies by what they perceived as an unequivocal correlation in Latin literary texts between male hegemony and obscene verbal aggression. That past history “illuminates contemporary problems in relationships between men and women” was one justification Pomeroy used to explain why she had written her book (Pomeroy 1995, xvii). If the historian has a mandate to explore the origins of gender inequality in order to know why discrimination continues to be institutionalized, one place to start is with the discourses that facilitate it. Consequently, several articles appearing at the end of the decade analyzed the power claims implicit in ribald or salacious language.⁶ This approach culminated in Amy Richlin's The Garden of Priapus (1983), an in-depth exploration of Roman sexual humor and its function in asserting the superiority of the speaker over targeted individuals or groups.

Richlin's work fully legitimated the study of ancient obscenity and related forms of sexual expression, visual and verbal, as a way of understanding the power dynamics inherent in Greek and Roman culture (Skinner 1986, 253, 257). At the same time it broached the question of how the contemporary feminist researcher is to react when confronted with ancient material distasteful to her. To illustrate the harmful quality of aggressive humor, Richlin cited links between violent sexual fantasies and acts of physical violence postulated in feminist research on pornography (77–80).⁷ Accordingly, she concluded, “Priapus”—that is, the tendentious humor characteristic of the texts she had examined—was no longer funny (213). In this fashion The Garden of Priapus helped to establish the convention of frankly “interested” scholarship that sought to change the present through gritty exposure of unpleasant truths about the past (Reckford 1996, 313–14). In Hellenic studies, Eva Keuls' The Reign of the Phallus (1985) had a similar aim, using vase paintings, many quite explicit, to substantiate the charge that democratic Athens was a “phallocracy” in which adult citizen males, who constituted the only advantaged group, harshly exploited inferiors, for the most part women. Predictably, certain reviewers were uncomfortable with that abandonment of conventional academic objectivity.⁸ In their polemic stance, however, these books, heavily indebted to feminist theory and terminology, seemed very much the products of their historical moment.

For the first decade of widespread scholarly attention to ancient sexuality, then, the course of development is comparatively linear. Prompted by second-wave feminism, some classicists entering the field during the 1970s began to investigate conditions of life for ancient women, including restrictions upon their own control of their bodies and the notion of woman's nature that authorized such curbs. Others began to trace relationships among sex, language, and power, particularly when manifested in offensive or threatening speech. After that the genealogy, if I may use that word, becomes more convoluted. K. J. Dover's Greek Homosexuality was published in 1978, to instant acclaim and widespread acceptance of his dominance–submission paradigm of Athenian sex...