From Shame to Sin

Kyle Harper

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674074583
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

When Rome was at its height, an emperor's male beloved, victim of an untimely death, would be worshipped around the empire as a god. In this same society, the routine sexual exploitation of poor and enslaved women was abetted by public institutions. Four centuries later, a Roman emperor commanded the mutilation of men caught in same-sex affairs, even as he affirmed the moral dignity of women without any civic claim to honor. The gradual transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian marks one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center of it all was sex. Exploring sources in literature, philosophy, and art, Kyle Harper examines the rise of Christianity as a turning point in the history of sexuality and helps us see how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.While Roman sexual culture was frankly and freely erotic, it was not completely unmoored from constraint. Offending against sexual morality was cause for shame, experienced through social condemnation. The rise of Christianity fundamentally changed the ethics of sexual behavior. In matters of morality, divine judgment transcended that of mere mortals, and shame—a social concept—gave way to the theological notion of sin. This transformed understanding led to Christianity's explicit prohibitions of homosexuality, extramarital love, and prostitution. Most profound, however, was the emergence of the idea of free will in Christian dogma, which made all human action, including sexual behavior, accountable to the spiritual, not the physical, world.

CHAPTER ONE

The Moralities of Sex in the Roman Empire

LEUCIPPE’S SHIELD AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ROMANCE

In the last of a long series of threats to her chastity, the heroine of a second-century Greek novel, Leucippe, stood in imminent danger of suffering sexual violence at the hands of a man claiming to be her master. The romantic novel, the characteristic literary invention of the Roman Empire, was a genre built out of such theatrical endangerments to feminine chastity. In the scene of her attempted rape, Leucippe is threatened by Thersander, a caricature of a villain whose very name means “Savage Man.” Leucippe, a freeborn girl of unparalleled beauty, has been enslaved by pirates and sold to this stereotypical brute. It was “fate’s wish” that she be a slave for a time, but her true status is never really in doubt, and the problematic relationship between status and behavior runs as a thread throughout the entire confrontation between Thersander and Leucippe. When Thersander puts his hands beneath Leucippe’s chin and lifts her face upward for a kiss, she resists and reproaches him, “You are not acting as a free man, nor as a wellborn one.” While his hopes were still high, Thersander remained “wholly enthralled” by Leucippe, but the disappointment of rebuff lets loose his fury. He resorts to physical and psychological violence, striking Leucippe across the face and calling her a “miserable slaveling.” “You should be grateful that I speak to you, and count your lucky stars that you seem worthy of my kisses.… I know that you’re just a little whore, and the man you love is an adulterer. Since you don’t want to accept me as your lover, you will experience me as your master.” In the slave society of the Roman Empire, where the routine sexual exploitation of slaves was an integral part of the sexual economy, the narration of such pedestrian violence was highly unusual, and surely jarring. But the author builds up the uncomfortable potential of the scene, only to let it dissipate in arch melodrama.¹

We are never really in suspense about Leucippe’s fate, and—what makes the scene so revealing—neither is she. At the tension grows, Leucippe tells Thersander to “bring the lash, bring the rack, bring the fire, bring the sword.… For though I be naked, for though I be alone, for though I be a woman, my one shield is my freedom [eleutheria], and not blows, nor blade, nor blaze shall prevail against it!” Leucippe is protected by her freedom, her eleutheria, at the very moment when her control over her body seemed most elusive. Her rhetoric speaks on two levels. Most directly, Leucippe means that she will be saved from her imminent distress because she is, in reality, free. She is the knowing heroine, confident her objective status will somehow ensure that she is not the victim in this tale. Eleutheria was a powerful word, conjuring not only free status but sexual respectability; for the Greeks and Romans, the two were inseparably fused. The eleuthera was the sexually honest woman, a virgin until marriage, chaste within marriage. The opposite of the eleuthera was the prostitute, and Leucippe is consoled in the midst of apparently insuperable danger by the truth of her nature and by the rules of romance, which, she seems to know, will not allow her to be violated. Her faith depends on her knowledge that the narrative logic of the Greek romance will ultimately obey the expectations of the social order.²

At the same time, Leucippe’s grand speech positions this novel within a matrix of cultural reflection on the perennial problem of free will and fate. Few cultures have been so pervasively fixated on the limits of human agency within a vast, impersonal cosmos as the inhabitants of the high Roman Empire. The Greek novels, on questions of sexuality and cosmology alike, were in direct dialogue with the homiletic and philosophical literature of the age. The novels explore the very themes that occupied sages and sophists across the Mediterranean. Freedom in the face of an overwhelming fate was the byword of Stoicism, and Achilles Tatius is, surely, manipulating the Stoic idea of an internal faculty, independent from any external cause, that Leucippe can exercise regardless of her circumstance. But the allusion to the problem of fate is hardly an endorsement of Stoicism—quite the opposite. Whereas the Stoics advised a carefully studied indifference to eros in a universe so vast that mankind’s pleasures were dwarfed by the unfathomable enormity of the heavens, the novels present a world keenly knit by the gods so that mankind might find in erotic fulfillment nothing short of salvation. Like the Stoic, Achilles appreciates the limited range of motion allotted to the individual by the cosmos; unlike the Stoic, he would locate selfhood and salvation in the movement of erotic energy through the heated clay of the human body. The novelist had the discretion to let art speak for itself, but his romance stands as an intricate rebuttal to the gloomy fastidiousness of his philosophical contemporaries.³

Leucippe’s freedom is a key to the way the novels work and the way they can guide us through the sexual landscape of the high Roman Empire. Her freedom referred at once to her social status and her subjective agency. Of course, the fact that she invokes her freedom at the exact moment when she seems most constrained underscores the extent to which the individual’s agency was limited. The novels are fatalistic romances, stories of the overpowering, divine force of erotic love. They are unusually aware of the external forces—nature and society—bearing on the individual and determining his or her fate. Here is the novels’ most authentic level of representation, and the greatest opportunity they afford to explore the relationship between erotic ideologies and social structure in the late classical period. They preserve for us something of the vitality, complexity, and chaos of sexual life in the second-century empire. Because Leucippe and Clitophon deliberately offers a panoramic vision of eros and its place in the world, we follow Achilles Tatius and consider the sexual experience of the high empire from various angles—same-sex eroticism, the expectations placed on women, the sexual life-course of men, the dynamics of marriage, the attitudes of the philosophers. Throughout, our goal is to find the interface between sexual energy and prevailing morality, the points of contact between the circulation of pleasures and the regulatory force of sexual norms. In the age of the romance, eros flourished unawares, serenely confident in its eternal powers, and if we did not know that Christianity was stirring in the hills, we might never have believed that the first icy gusts of denial could be felt sweeping across the ancient valleys.

THE CURRENT FASHION: SAME-SEX EROS IN THE HIGH EMPIRE

Around the age of nineteen, Clitophon’s cousin Leucippe came to live with him and his family in Tyre. He fell in love with her at first sight. Paralyzed by his infatuation, he took his troubles to his cousin Clinias, only two years his elder but already “an initiate of eros.” Clinias quickly became his trusty counselor. The passions of Clinias were for a meirakion, a boy somewhere in his later teens, and his coaching is meant to be understood in terms of pederastic norms. The ancient novels are, both superficially and in their deep structure, stories of heterosexual love, but same-sex amours still find an important place. In fact, the first two books of Leucippe and Clitophon are framed by the traditional assumptions of classical Greek pederasty, transposed onto a heterosexual plot. Clinias claimed that “boy and maiden” alike shared a sense of shame; seduction, he argued, required the lover to draw out the beloved’s consent by the most delicate rituals of courtship, slowly wearing down the beloved’s guard without making startling moves. Then, Clinias advised, “when you have a tacit understanding that the next step is the big deed, even those who are ready to surrender prefer the appearance of compulsion, to let the façade of force deflect the shame of consent.” Couched in terms of a plot to seduce Leucippe, Clinias lays bare the central contradiction of classical pederastic norms: it required from the younger partner forms of consent that were intrinsically disgraceful.⁴

One of the more unlikely misprisions to have prevailed among historians of antiquity is the view that modes and practices of same-sex contact withered in the high empire. In Veyne’s words, ancient bisexuality disappeared. But reports of same-sex love’s demise have been much exaggerated. Clinias is presented as a sympathetic figure, even if his lessons nearly lead Clitophon and Leucippe into irreversible trouble. His erotic style looms over the first two books of the romance, culminating in a famous rhetorical set-piece on a boat that Leucippe and Clitophon have taken to elope. After noting that “male-love has somehow become the current fashion,” Clitophon and one of the passengers, Menelaus, debate the relative merits of loving women and loving boys. Clitophon professes that his sexual experience has been limited to “the women who sell Aphrodite,” but, as Menelaus notes, he certainly sounds like no novice. In fact, Clitophon delivers the most elaborate encomium on the female orgasm that the ancient world has left to us. The frantic, gasping delight of the woman is integral to his case for the superiority of female lovers. Like other advocates of women, such as Plutarch, Clitophon emphasizes the promise of mutual pleasure in heterosexual aphrodisia to contrast it with the presumptive one-way pleasure of pederasty. But where Plutarch focused on the warm companionship that could arise from sexual familiarity, the erotic novel describes the transport of sexual ecstasy experienced by men and women—even, if Clitophon has not been misled, by the vendors of Aphrodite.⁵

Menelaus, by contrast, marshals a highly conventional case against women, centered on their softness and artificiality. He extols the sharp, if brief, pleasures of loving boys, “whose very evanescence makes the pleasure so much greater.” He develops a contrast between feminine contrivance and the “naturalness” of male kisses. Unlike other “contests of the loves,” no winner is declared aboard the boat in the novel of Achilles. Nevertheless, the author’s position is implicit, both in the narrative placement of the contest and in the fate of the same-sex amours. The first two books are full of failed love, most notably Clitophon’s disastrous near-seduction of Leucippe, carried out under the advisement of Clinias. More revealing, both Clinias and Menelaus, the lovers of boys, experience the early death of their beloveds in tragic accidents for which they are indirectly responsible. In Leucippe and Clitophon, same-sex love can bring pleasure, but only mutual eros culminating in marriage receives the protection of the gods. Same-sex love is perishable, whereas the universe was built so that the rapturous delights of heterosexual aphrodisia would have a place. The love of boys, in the romance, was not sinful or abnormal, but it was transitory and tragic, for it had no happy resolution in a story destined to end with marriage.⁶

The ancient reader of Achilles Tatius would have noticed a conspicuous absence in the apology for pederasty. Nowhere do we find the soaring, spiritualized defense of an elevated form of mentorship that harnessed the power of erotic attraction for virtuous ends. In part the absence of any such defense is explained by the setting of the debate within an erotic novel, whose generic conventions accept and insist on the frankly sexual nature of human companionship. But in a deeper sense Leucippe and Clitophon is a cipher for attitudes toward pederasty in the Roman Empire. It is telling that Foucault sees pederasty in the novel as “episodic and marginal.” Central to Foucault’s presentation of Roman sexual culture is the claim that in the high empire, “reflection on the love of boys lost some of its intensity, its seriousness, its vitality.” The decline of pederasty, or at least its diminished place in the moral economy of sex, is treated as the counterpart of the conjugalization of pleasure. Foucault finds in the high empire a “philosophical disinvestment” from the institution of pederasty.⁷

The claim rests entirely on a comparison with “the lofty formulations of the classical period,” notably Plato’s. If comparison with classical Greece seems inevitable in any discussion of pederasty, such a benchmark is nevertheless bound to lead to a stilted measure of Roman sexual culture. Seen in broader perspective, the story of Roman-era pederasty is not its decline but its liveliness. Foucault’s judgments are simply misguided. The place of pederasty in Leucippe and Clitophon, which is important enough to frame the first quarter of the novel, helps us to situate contemporary attitudes to pederasty in terms of high imperial culture, rather than in comparison to classical Greece. A heightened and almost impolitic insistence on the physical essence of love, an awareness that the beloved’s consent could not be squared with social honor, and narratives of eros that sought to understand the place of mankind’s sexual instincts within the cosmos: these, rather than disapproval or disinvestment, make up the story of pederasty in the Roman Empire.⁸

The Greeks and Romans of this period believed that beauty resided in the male as well as the female body, and they were never surprised when the sight of a beautiful body aroused sexual desire. “Did you never feel eros for someone, for a boy or girl, slave or free?” A farcical tale of travel to the afterlife imagined that on the Isle of the Blessed, “all the wives are shared in common without jealousy … and the boys all submit to their pursuers without resistance.” Pastoral poetry, meant to evoke an idealized harmony between man and nature, made boys the object of erotic attraction, from Virgil (who was said to be more fond of boys than of women) to Nemesianus, a court poet of the late third century. Marcus Aurelius, who learned from his adoptive grandfather to “cease all things concerned with the love of youths,” thanked the gods that he had touched “neither Theodotus nor Benedicta”—the casual indifference to the gender of the erotic object is what is telling. The traditional myths still held that even the gods were sexually indiscriminate: Zeus became a swan for Leda, but an eagle for Ganymede: “some think one or the other is greater, but they’re equal to me.”⁹

Age dynamics were at the core of acceptable same-sex love in the Roman world. The “short season of rejoicing” was the span of time between early adolescence and the growth of the first beard. In the wry words of a witty courtesan, “boys are beautiful so long as they look like females.” The physiological boundaries of pederasty were flexible, if inexorable, indeed a symbol of evanescence: “time, which lays waste to beauty.” Sixteen to eighteen were the canonically acceptable years, propriety decreasing by degrees with distance from this window, without firm breaks. A mischievous poet from the age of Hadrian was indiscreetly precise: the age of seventeen marked a sort of perfection reserved for Zeus himself; after that, he said, there was a risk the boy might turn the tables. It was a traditional charge: by twenty, when the boy had a bristling chin, there was too much suspicion of alternating sexual roles. But in Lucian’s satirical account of an all-male society on the moon, the boys played the part of wives until twenty-five, then entered the ranks of the husbands.¹⁰

The notion of “Greek love” is misleading on two counts. In the first place, practices and attitudes varied across the Greek world, and classical Athenian culture was hardly standard. Even in Athens, pederasty could not be washed of its aristocratic connotations, and the law was ambiguous enough that the adult partner might find himself liable for criminal violation. It is an even greater error, though, to insinuate that Greek love was not an indigenous Roman practice. This charge goes back to late republican moralists, who, in chauvinistic terms, decried the effects of underlying social change as the by-product of Hellenization. In reality, Greek and Roman codes of sexual behavior shared profound structural similarities: a sexual act was composed of an active and a passive partner, and masculinity required the insertive role. Roman pederasty was distinct in small but decisive ways. The Romans had an absolute abhorrence for the violation of freeborn boys; the body of the Roman man was impenetrable, and there was no twilight of indeterminacy between boyhood and manhood. This prohibition was backed by the fearsome power of public law. The severity of the rule eliminated the zone of ambiguity that had proven such fertile ground in the Greek philosophical tradition for celebrating the mentorship of the lover and beloved.¹¹

The great chasm separating Roman pederastic practice from earlier models was the omnipresence of slaves. Classical Greece had seen an unprecedented expansion of the slave trade, which laid the institutional and commercial foundations for the Roman slave system. Slaves, already in Greek culture, were subjected to untrammeled sexual abuse. But the Romans built one of history’s most enduring and extensive slave systems, and the ownership of slaves would gradually shape virtually every social institution in Roman life, including pederasty. The laws deflected lust away from the freeborn body, and slaves provided a ready outlet. In Roman pederasty, elaborate courtship before the act was replaced by the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: From City to Cosmos
• 1. The Moralities of Sex in the Roman Empire
• 2. The Will and the World in Early Christian Sexuality
• 3. Church, Society, and Sex in the Age of Triumph
• 4. Revolutionizing Romance in the Late Classical World
• Conclusion: Sex and the Twilight of Antiquity
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index