Integral to the story of gender is the story of sexuality. The protocols that govern intercourse have increasingly played an important part in defining gender roles. Some have even claimed that modern manhood is incomprehensible without an acknowledgment that every facet of masculinity is underpinned by the notion of the ‘‘homosexual’’ (Sedgwick 1990). Gender and sexuality are unified by process. In both cases, society slyly attempts to graft itself onto biology. Intercourse comes to be so much more than just a biomechanical act. It becomes a signifier of identity. This shift from act to identity is normally envisioned as a nineteenth-century phenomenon. However, like most paradigm shifts, there has been a tendency amongst scholars to overschematize the transition (Halperin 2002: 27-32). The collocation of sex acts and identity is a process whose history stretches back to antiquity. However, these earlier protosexualities were ephemeral affairs that neither dominated the field nor made any claims to exclusivity. The libertine and the pederast may have been identifiable by more than their sexual activities, but these personages did not claim to be the only character types around, or the most essential aspects of the self. What distinguishes the nineteenth-century ‘‘turn to sexuality’’ is the importance of the claims made about sexuality and the reduction of the wide varieties of sexual practice to two overarching categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Sex had become the touchstone of normative behavior. It was only in the act of coitus that the true self was revealed.
There had always been a link between antiquity and sex acts. Fired up by Christian polemic, the classical world enjoyed a reputation as a place of moral depravity in which gluttony, drunkenness, and fornication were rife. Sodomy for a long period was described by the euphemism amor Socraticus (Socratic love; Dall’Orto 1989). The explicit references to oral sex in Martial made a strong impression on Ben Jonson (Boehrer 1998). Despite the best efforts of Neoplatonic allegorists, the story of the abduction of Ganymede by Zeus was never quite able to slough off its erotic connotations (Saslow 1986). Works such as Karl Forberg’s De figuris veneris (On depictions of love) (1824) collected together references to all the various sexual acts found in classical sources. This work was a popular one, with English, French, and Italian translations in circulation. Later editions even included pornographic etchings by the French artist Paul Avril. Over the course of 19 plates, Avril offered a trip through classical antiquity that stressed the wide variety of pleasures available. Viewers were treated to such images of sodomy as Hadrian anally penetrating Anti-nous over the end of a couch, while the Nile flowed in the background and a barebreasted female attendant gently fanned the sweaty figures. Meanwhile on the island of Lesbos, the poet Sappho enjoyed cunnilingus and frolicking mermaids mimicked her pleasure. On Capri, we find the emperor Tiberius digitally penetrating a young girl, and in another scene an unnamed Pompeian couple engaged in fellatio whilst Vesuvius explodes in the background. The classical world depicted by Avril seems to be frantically exploring every possible combination of coupling. Nineteen plates can barely contain the range of practices.
The queer world of Avril’s etchings marks a final flourish. Just as the discourse on sex narrows and solidifies around two sexualities, so the interest in works such as Forberg’s diminishes. Attention moved away from cataloguing every species of sexual practices. Now only two seemed to matter - homosexual and heterosexual acts - and the focus on the classical world shifts correspondingly. In particular, there was a new urgent interest shown in the classical past by the first generation of self-identifying homosexuals. One of the key debates in the period surrounds the origins of homosexual behavior. Was homosexuality the product of an aberrant physiology or psychology, or were its origins grounded in nature? In order to naturalize their desire, homosexual apologists were keen to stress an historical continuity of homosexual persons that extended to antiquity. So, for example, John Addington Symonds (1840-93) remarks, ‘‘The truth is that ancient Greece offers insuperable difficulties to theorists who treat sexual inversion exclusively from the points of view of neuropathology, tainted heredity, or masturbation’’ (Blanshard 2000). Perhaps the most famous of these homosexual genealogies is contained in Wilde’s famous speech on the ‘‘Love that dare not speak its name’’ given in his 1895 trial, in which Wilde recited a list of famous figures beginning with David and Jonathan and continuing through Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare. It is a fairly conventional list. Every ‘‘sexual invert’’ in London could have listed these names and a dozen more. Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) in Homogenic Love, published two months before the Wilde trial, remarks:
Certainly it is remarkable that some of the world’s greatest leaders and artists have been
Dowered either wholly or in part with the Uranian temperament - as in the cases of Plato,
Socrates, Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or, among
Women, Christine of Sweden, Sappho the poetess, and others.
Such rhetorical gestures were even the subject of parody in works such as Mallock’s The New Republic (1877). A number of undergraduate pamphlets circulated
Throughout Oxford and Cambridge, each proclaiming the historical continuity of same-sex practice. Boy Love and Boy Worship (1880) are the most (in)famous, but they merely represent the most extreme examples of discursive practice that circulated through poetry, letters, diary entries, art, and informal conversation. It was not just in the imagined past that homosexuals sought refuge. They often fled to Mediterranean countries to live amongst the classical ruins, setting up enclaves in which they could enjoy the freedom to live alternate lifestyles free from the strictures of their home countries (Aldrich 1993). This homosexual appropriation of the classical past continued well into the late twentieth century. The importance of Sappho to contemporary lesbian identity is well documented (Reynolds 2003; Vanita 1996). Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976), in turn, updated the story of the Roman martyr for contemporary queer politics (Wyke 1998) and created a figure whose plight only continued to resonate more strongly with the deepening of the AIDS crisis (Kaye 1996).
FURTHER READING
There are numerous introductions to the field of gender studies. The collections by Meade and Wiesner-Hanks (2003) and Essed et al. (2004) provide coverage of the important issues and debates. On the topic of classical exemplars, a translation with facing Latin text of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus is available in the I Tatti Renaissance Library series (Brown 2001). On the image of Alexander the Great, see the studies by Aerts et al. (1978), Bunt (1994), Bridges and Burgel (1996), Cary (1956), Cizek (1995), and Stoneman (1994). For the Hercules myth, the most comprehensive treatment is Galinsky (1972). See also Blanshard (2005), Schultze
(1999) , and Riley (2004). The use of classical myth in constructing modern masculinity is discussed in Holtsmark (1981). For the use of classical history in a school context, see Toebes (2001). On the rape of Lucretia, see Camino (1995) and Donaldson (1982). On the image of the Amazon, see Blok (1995), Daniels
(2000) , March and Passman (1994), and Passman (1991). For feminist appropriations of Clytemnestra, see Komar (2003). For other significant uses of myth, see Meagher (1995), Rudd (1994), Solterer (1995), Van Keuren (1998), and Yarnall
(1994) . The use of Cleopatra is treated in studies by Hamer (1993), Hughes-Hallett (1990), and Wyke (2002: 244-320; cf. 321-90 on the image of Messalina). The way in which issues of gender intersect with race in the figure of Cleopatra is examined by Royster (2003). On Jane Ellen Harrison the most sensitive treatment is Beard
(2000) . For a general discussion of the notion of women in classical medicine, see King (1993, 1998) and Harrison (1995). For Renaissance medicine, see Dixon
(1995) , Maclean (1980), and Thompson (1999). A useful collection of essays on hysteria has been assembled by Gilman et al. (1993). On ‘‘peplum films,’’ see Chapman (2002). On modern bodybuilding, see Dutton (1995) and Kasson
(2001) . For political use of the classical body, see Leoussi (1998). On sexuality and antiquity, see Gold et al. (1997), Goldhill (2004), Montague (1994), Paxson and
Gravalee (1998), and Tomlinson (1992). A desire of eroticized antiquity even embraces the Minoans (Lapatin 2002). For a general history of homosexuality and its treatment in early-modern Europe, see Boswell (1980) and Brooten (1997). On Victorian homosexuality and its relationship with Hellenism, see Dowling (1994). Its impact on art is discussed in Barrow (2000).
A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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