By Craig A. Williams
This e-book offers a completely documented dialogue of historical Roman ideologies of masculinity and sexuality with a spotlight on historic representations of sexual adventure among men. It gathers a variety of proof from the second one century B.C. to the second one century A.D.--above all from such literary texts as court speeches, love poetry, philosophy, epigram, and historical past, but in addition graffiti and different inscriptions in addition to creative artifacts--and makes use of that facts to reconstruct the contexts in which Roman texts have been created and had their that means. The publication takes as its place to begin the thesis that during order to appreciate the Roman fabric, we needs to take the time to put aside any preconceptions we would have relating to sexuality, masculinity, and effeminacy.
Williams' ebook argues intimately that for the writers and readers of Roman texts, the real differences have been drawn no longer among gay and heterosexual, yet among loose and slave, dominant and subordinate, masculine and effeminate as conceived in in particular Roman phrases. different very important questions addressed through this booklet contain the variations among Roman and Greek practices and ideologies; the impact exerted via distinctively Roman beliefs of austerity; the ways that deviations from the norms of masculine sexual perform have been negotiated either within the enviornment of public discourse and in genuine men's lives; the connection among the rhetoric of ''nature'' and representations of sexual practices; and the level to which same-sex marriages have been publicly authorized.
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Extra resources for Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity
Example text
On the other hand, the distribution of physical roles was supposed to be aligned with the power-differential between master and slave: the master must be seen as playing the active role and the slave the passive role. There are scattered allusions to a reversal of roles (Seneca writes of a slave who is "a man in the bedroom, a boy in the dining room" and Martial pointedly observes that a certain man's anus is as sore as his slave-boy's penis),95 but Seneca is scandalized and Martial is teasing, and the scenarios they describe are precisely inversions of the expected pattern.
Secundus butt-fucked [ . . ] boys. I fucked a bar-maid. D. 30 Less coarse but equally typical is a metrical graffito found on a wall of Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome that offers this opinion, possibly making a naughty pun in the process: Roman Traditions 21 quisquis amat pueros, etiam sin(e) fine puellas, rationem saccli non h(a)bet illo sui. 34 These physical artifacts incisively symbolize the Roman male sexual persona in its most elemental form: the phallus, ready, willing, and able to assert its penetrative power at the expense of another, female or male.
I like sex that is easy and obtainable. The chatty style and appeals to the three basic appetites for food, drink, and sex give a common-sense feeling to his argument. 106 The epigrams of Martial give us a clear view of a cultural landscape in which the availability of beautiful slave-boys as sexual companions for their masters was a prominent feature. 43). Contrasting with this self-pitying stance, plenty of other epigrams show Martial not only fantasizing about but actually enjoying the company of compliant slave-boys, and these range from the lyrical: O mihi grata quies, o blanda, Telesphore, cura, qualis in amplexu non fuit ante meo .