Skip to main contentIt is axiomatic among the unread "saved" that the scourge of homosexuality toppled the Roman Empire. In fact, the empire was already fully Christianized before the real rot and ruin set in, a cautionary point that should be imparted to Reichsbishop Ashcroft. Unlike the wandering children of Shem, the ancient Greeks and Romans were spared the murderous snits of Jehovah, and so were more tolerant in their view of human sexuality.
Yet, even though their own gods dabbled on occasion, homosexuality was far from institutional among our forebears. There were actually great philosophical debates surrounding the subject, along with some open hostility for the practice, as Thomas K. Hubbard shows in his new book, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome.
Subtitled "A Sourcebook of Basic Documents," Hubbard's book creates the first compendium of primary texts from the Greco-Roman world that deal with queerness. The reigning literary lights of the ancient world are here (Sappho, Plato, Livy, Plautus, Apuleius, Ovid) along with a wealth of lesser-known writers and their work. There is even surviving graffiti from Pompeii: "Felix sucks for a nickel."
What is startling in reading this book is how unoriginal the contemporary world is, as everything we're quarreling over has already been hashed out among our betters. Is homosexuality genetic? Both Aristotle's school and Hippocrates said yes. Is it against nature? If so, said Strato (writing in the time of Hadrian), "we reasoning men have this over other animals." Heterosexuality was unthinking and only fit for fields and forest.
Most of the negative emotion surrounding homosexuality carried the stench of misogyny. Men who took passive roles in lovemaking were ridiculed for their womanliness (a synonym for worthlessness and wantonness). "Who ever spared an enemy camp less than he did all the parts of his body?" thundered Cicero in 56 B.C.E. against Clodius Pulcher. "What public ferry in a river was ever made so accessible to all as his youth was?"
The emperor Elagabalus (218 to 222 C.E.) was especially hated by chroniclers and may have been the first transsexual. According to Dio Cassius, he "even saw fit to ask his physicians to construct a vagina for him by means of a posterior incision, offering them a large compensation."
It is, however, the great feelings of love and passion that fill this collection: "The cables of my life, Myiscus, are fitted to you/ In you too is the last breath of my soul" (Meleager, 100 B.C.E.); "Melinna herself is re-created: notice the face/ Is gentle; she seems to gaze serenely at us" (Nossis, a successor to Sappho).
Aristophanes' marvelous theory of divided souls is here (recently adopted in Hedwig and the Angry Inch), as is Lucien's True History (the first work of science fiction, from the second century C.E.), in which Lucien travels to the moon to observe the moon men planting testicles like seeds to grow other men.
Hubbard reminds us how rich ancient literature is, and often how wise. True diversity has never found a better slogan than Terence's: "I hold that nothing human is alien to me."
by Thomas K. Hubbard
(University of California Press, 558 pages, $34.95)
"Protarchus is handsome, but unwilling. Yet he will be willing later. Youth's time with its torch is running by."
--Alcaeus of Messene
WWeek 2015