Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome

Sandra Boehringer

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000396164
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: Greek Ancient History

This groundbreaking study, among the earliest syntheses on female homosexuality throughout Antiquity, explores the topic with careful reference to ancient concepts and views, drawing fully on the existing visual and written record including literary, philosophical, and scientific documents.

Even today, ancient female homosexuals are still too often seen in terms of a mythical, ethereal Sapphic love, or stereotyped as "Amazons" or courtesans. Boehringer's scholarly book replaces these clichés with rigorous, precise analysis of iconography and texts by Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Juvenal, and many other lyric poets, satirists, and astrological writers, in search of the prevailing norms, constraints, and possibilities for erotic desire. The portrait emerges of an ancient society to which today's sexual categories do not apply—a society "before sexuality"—where female homosexuality looks very different, but is nonetheless very real.

Now available in English for the first time, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome includes a preface by David Halperin. This book will be of value to students and scholars of ancient sexuality and gender, and to anyone interested in histories and theories of sexuality.

1

MYTH AND ARCHAIC LYRIC POETRY

Homoeroticism in the Feminine

To work with texts from the Archaic period is to encounter scarce and fragmentary documents, even more difficult to interpret because they are poetic texts, archeological “traces” of choral or monodic songs cut off from their enunciative contexts, and also because they are often almost the only sources of information we have about the period in which they were written. When it comes to Sappho and her reception, a mountain of books and articles looms up between the ancient texts and the scholar of today, and there is a real risk of devoting more energy to synthesizing the various approaches adopted by different generations of philologists than to engaging with the texts themselves, which are particularly difficult to establish and whose meaning is often uncertain. With Sappho, we find ourselves in the same situation as with the question of male initiatic homosexuality in the pre-Archaic and Archaic periods: few original documents, but widely divergent interpretations and fiery debates in the scholarly record. Research in this area was clouded for a very long time by issues of “morality.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker insisted that Sappho could not be a lesbian, because she was such a great poetess; Sappho was a schoolteacher, not a female homosexual, wrote Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf at the start of the twentieth century.¹ Current debate focuses on the reliability of documents written in periods later than the Archaic texts themselves, and on the enunciative nature and context of these poetic compositions.

In order to study the works of Alcman and Sappho, we first need to clarify some issues concerning rites of passage and male initiation. For one thing, this may have been one social and cultural context in which the discourses we are concerned with emerged; for another, it has often been the lens through which texts by Sappho and Alcman have been read and interpreted. I will follow this with a closer reading of selected passages from both poets, to investigate whether these choral and monodic songs express female homoerotic desire, and move on to analyze a notably tricky poem by Anacreon and a vase representing two women that dates from the Archaic period. But the question of female homosexuality at such early periods also leads us to the key question of its presence in myth. While Bernard Sergent’s work² has demonstrated the resonance of the male pederastic model in myths dealing with erotic relations between men (be they mortals, heroes, or gods), up until now scholars have seemed to agree that no myth exists which shows erotic relations between women. The study of one myth—the story of Kallisto—may shed some doubt on this certainty.

1 Welcker 1816; Wilamowitz 1913.

2 Sergent 1984.

Fragments of a lover’s discourse

An institutionalization of homosexuality

Men

One of the arguments or indications that led Bernard Sergent, the author of L’Homosexualité initiatique dans l’Europe ancienne, to advance his hypothesis of “initiatic homosexuality” was that during the Classical period (for which scholars have access to more numerous and more varied documents), an important form of relation between men involved an asymmetrical model, sometimes of a pedagogical character.³ Indeed, in Classical Athens, the kinds of same-sex male relationships that were valued and met the normative criteria of the polis were those involving a boy (παῖς)—i.e., a future citizen—and a young adult citizen.⁴ This παιδεραστία follows precise rules: the lover (ἐραστής) must play an active role while the young favorite or beloved (ἐρώμενος), for his part, must not demonstrate any passionate sexual attraction toward his lover. These relations were neither exclusive nor permanent, as the lover might be married, and the favorite might, in turn, become an erastês to someone else.⁵ This is a codification of a normative ideal; a host of available documents attest that there were many other forms of same-sex male relations in Greece.⁶ But what matters at this juncture is that, as Luc Brisson writes, “at least in its ideal form, παιδεραστία in Greece was a curious synthesis between sexual relationship and educational practice.”⁷ This form of relation between males, implying both social asymmetry and pedagogical apprenticeship—valorized, codified and thus in a sense institutionalized—is unambiguously attested at the Classical period and also in Archaic poems and iconography.⁸ According to Bernard Sergent and Harald Patzer, this convention regulating relations between men in the Classical period should be seen as the trace of an ancient Indo-European rite of passage.

3 Sergent 1984 and 1986. Sergent’s work is partly a continuation of the pioneering comparative studies conducted by Jeanmaire and Brelich (Jeanmaire 1939; Brelich 1969). More recently, studies conducted by Patzer and Bremmer also point to the existence of an initiation ritual, but they offer very different analyses of the way the Greeks evaluated this adult male/adolescent relation (Bremmer 1980 and 1989b; Patzer 1982): in Bremmer’s view, the young boy is “humiliated” by the group of adult males, while Sergent perceives it as a positive and valorizing act for the young favorite.

4 For a synthesis on this issue, see Brisson 1998, pp. 55–63.

5 On the norms that applied for this type of relationship, see Dover [1978] 1989, Halperin 1990, and Winkler 1990, pp. 45–70.

6 For practices that fall outside this scheme, see Brisson 2000a (on the long-term relationship between Agathon and Pausanias); Winkler 1990, pp. 45–70 (on the way these codes were circumvented); Halperin, “The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens,” in Halperin 1990, pp. 88–112 (on male prostitution).

7 Brisson 1998, p. 62.

8 For literary and iconographic references, see Dover [1978] 1989, pp. 195–196 (he stresses the non-Dorian origin of his sources) and Cantarella [1988] 2002, pp. 3–53.

The issue of initiation is still being bitterly debated, with considerable disagreement regarding the interpretation of the main sources (Ephorus, Plutarch, the Thera inscriptions, Ammianus Marcellinus, Aelian).⁹ Kenneth Dover¹⁰ contests the theories advanced by Patzer and Sergent: he concedes that male initiation practices (without a sexual dimension) did exist, but rejects the hypothesis according to which same-sex male relations in Athens would be survivals of this rite. Dover’s argument questioned the validity of certain documents and took issue with how others were interpreted. Patzer and Sergent’s whole approach drew some methodological criticism, since it seemed to rest on an assumption about sexual normality (after all, no one ever searches for the “origins” of heterosexuality).¹¹ That is basically Halperin’s reproach to Patzer:

By purifying pederasty of sexual desire and interpreting it not as an expression of personal preference but rather as a form of social ritual (thus relegating it to the category of activities set apart from normal daily life and only performed under specially sanctioned circumstances), Patzer in effect maintains heterosexual activity as the ordinary locus of eroticism—even for the Greeks, despite their various sexual peculiarities—and thereby preserves it as the privileged and normative mode of human sexuality.¹²

9 Ephorus quoted by Strabo, Geography, X, 4; the Archaic inscriptions on the island of Thera (see the numerous references in Sergent [1986] 1996, pp. 353–369); Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 7, 1; Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, XXXI, 9.5; Aelian, Various History, III, 12.

10 Dover [1978] 1989, especially p. 195, and Dover 1988.

11 In the afterword to the 1996 edition of his two books (1984 and 1986), Sergent responds to some of his critics. In this section where he explains his approach again at length (Sergent 1996, p. 623–654), it is clear that the purpose of the work is not to provide an etiology for homosexuality.

12 “Two Views of Greek Love,” in Halperin 1990, pp. 54–71.

Furthermore, certain studies on initiation practices are based on a “natural” opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality, thus projecting twentieth-century categories and beliefs back onto the past.

The documents concerning men are indeed problematic: some date from a much later point than the period under consideration, and others are very difficult to interpret. Yet it does not strike me as absurd to consider the possibility that this type of relation may have constituted one of the stages in Indo-European ceremonies or rites of passage and have played a part in the education and training of the future adult, without regarding it as an “explanation” for practices that might be regarded as exotic or reprehensible, or as a “justification” for all forms of same-sex male relations. Rather, this hypothesis forcefully points up the relativity of the category of “sexuality” itself: rather than perceiving initiatic homosexuality as a desexualization of homosexual practices, one might also perceive it as an extension of the sphere of the sexual, which would then encompass areas (education, for instance) that are excluded from this sphere today—without taking up the question of which cultural practice comes first (i.e., are we looking at an educational relationship that becomes sexual, or a sexual relationship that over time takes on an educational dimension¹³).

Be that as it may, during the Archaic period dissymmetry between lovers (difference in age and social status in particular) was an accepted convention of the male homosexual relation whose traces are found in the literary texts of the time.

Women

With respect to women, the issue is even trickier. Very few documents have ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Translator’s note
• Preface to the English translation (2020): Female Homosexuality, a History in the Present Tense
• David Halperin, Preface to Sandra Boehringer, L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007)
• Acknowledgments (2007)
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: toward a constructionist exploration of ancient sexuality
• 1 Myth and Archaic lyric poetry: homoeroticism in the feminine
• 2 Classical and Hellenistic Greece: from silence to humor
• 3 The Roman period: from mythical fiction to satire
• Epilogue: Lucian and the saturation of signs
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of ancient authors and works
• Index of modern authors
• Index rerum