The Roman Empire: vast in space, long in time. How can we imagine something as elusive as sexuality over that wide expanse? Since the 1970s, classical scholars have been thinking about sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean, but most have focused on Greeks from Athens and Romans from Rome. to the interest taken in the subject by Michel Foucault in his last work, discussion has often revolved around questions Foucault found important, especially pederasty and sexual identity (Foucault 1988; for overviews, see Edwards 1993; Larmour et al. 1998; Skinner 1996). But in order to get an idea of sexuality as a whole in the Roman Empire as a whole, we need to dolly back.
Let me propose a thought experiment: the Kinsey II Expedition to the Roman Empire. Afire with the possibilities opened up by the invention of a reliable time machine, Kinsey II and his crew of lab-coated assistants have grabbed their clipboards and questionnaires and are about to set out on an immense project. They will fan out to all parts of the Roman Empire, starting in the year 14 ce and returning to antiquity at 70-year intervals: 84, 154, 224, 294, 364, 434. Much as they wish they could carry on to the fall of Byzantium, they have decided to take the end of the empire in the West as a stopping point.
They have devised a simple questionnaire: 20 questions. Imagine their findings on an enormous grid, with the 20 questions down the left-hand margin, and across the page the responses from people from all walks of life, in all parts of the empire; seven groups per question, each a long lifetime apart, each subdivided per social group and per location. This is a period of history in which many people were slaves, and a large proportion of the population lived in the country, and, as always, half the people (selective infanticide aside) were female; the Kinsey II group is careful to make selections for interviewees proportionate to the current demographics (on selective infanticide, see Boswell 1988: 40-3, with bibliography). Moreover, they have with them another new invention, a simultaneous translator that allows them to talk to people in any of the hundred languages spoken in the empire, from the
Armenians and Babylonians in the east to the Spanish tribes in the far west, from the desert nomads in the south to the Celts and Germans in the far north, so they go to all these places and ask their questions. Through tact and luck they manage to avoid being crucified or eaten or stoned to death; thanks to antibiotics and rubber gloves they avoid malaria and various plagues. The crew for Pompeii goes in six years early, thus avoiding being blown up with Vesuvius. They complete their collection of data. Their statistical model allows for the fact that people lie about sex.
Now imagine that over this enormous grid we could put a clear plastic overlay showing where we do have statements from people about sexuality, with every one colored in. We would see huge clear spaces on the overlay: where Kinsey II spoke with women, we would have almost nothing; where they spoke with slaves, even with workers of any kind, almost nothing; where they journeyed into the country, nothing; where they spoke languages other than Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a little Egyptian, nothing; whole huge areas of the empire are just clear plastic on our chart, and long stretches of time in the third century CE. But not to worry, because beneath the overlay would be all the words painstakingly collected by Kinsey II, which cover all times and all places and all people equally.
In fact, of course, all we have is the overlay sheet, and what Kinsey II might write is wholly invisible to us. We can look for what the people we do have say about the people we have no access to, but since we hardly expect them to give an accurate account of themselves, we have low expectations of the truth value in what they say about others. We might still make up some kind of narrative out of it.
To put this narrative in perspective, a few things about Kinsey I - Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology at Indiana University. In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey et al. 1948), Kinsey says that: 12,000 people were interviewed for the report, but he hoped to interview 88,000 more (dedication); his questionnaire included 521 items, though an interview was likely to deal with only 300 or so of these (63); he undertook his study of human sexual behavior because, ‘‘as a taxonomist, [he] was struck with the inadequacy of the samples on which such studies were being based’’ (9). He had previously worked with insects, where, he says, ‘‘we had had 150,000 individuals available for the study of a single species’’ (9).
His Figure 1, a map of the United States (Kinsey et al. 1948: 5), shows ‘‘Sources of histories’’; there is a pronounced skew towards the northeast, with many of the western states having only 50 interviews apiece. (If we mapped what we have from the Roman Empire, many of its provinces would have zero.) He used a twelve-way breakdown to aim for thorough coverage of social groups (63-82), including ‘‘Rural-Urban Background’’ (79), which is further broken down into five subgroups. One list of the kinds of persons who were interviewed includes: ‘‘Bootleggers, Clergymen, Clerks, College professors, Farmers, Female prostitutes, Gamblers, Housewives, Lawyers, Male prostitutes, Marriage counselors, Ne’er-do-wells, Persons in the Social Register, Physicians, Pimps, Police court officials, Prison inmates, Professional women, Thieves and hold-up men, Women’s Club leaders’’ (39). I have boldfaced the categories on this list that can be represented from ancient sources as a sort of miniature version of the thought experiment with the grid and the overlay. It is customary these days to look down on Kinsey; we must think first of how little we are able to do in comparison with him. His example is helpful in constructing a narrative that knows where its holes are.
World History
