[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This collection of essays grew out of a panel at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in San Diego, California. Overall, this volume presents a valuable collection of research from veteran pioneers in the field of sex and gender in classical antiquity and younger scholars.
The Latin word cinaedus and its Greek antecedent kinaidos both refer to a feminine-gendered male who submits sexually to other men. Broadly speaking, the essays in this volume explore the so-called “figure” of the cinaedus in a conceptual and categorical sense. This choice of editorial focus grows out of a particular approach to gender and sexuality in the field of classics that can be traced to the work of the twentieth-century French historian of ideas Michel Foucault (1926–1984), and particularly to Foucault’s History of Sexuality, a three-volume work that considered sexuality as a “discourse”; that is, a historically specific and socially constructed category, rather than something hard, fast, and immutable or essential. In fact, the distinction between Foucault’s radically new approach and more traditional methods was often referred to as “constructivism” versus “essentialism.” (A fourth volume of History of Sexuality was published posthumously in 2018.)
Foucault’s ideas became highly influential both to feminist and gay liberationist thinking, scholarship, and even activism in the 1980s. Even before the influence of Foucault became widespread in American scholarship, the field of classics was ahead of the curve in exploring the history of gender and sexuality, starting with such texts as Jeffrey Henderson’s The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (1975); Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1978); J.N. Adams’ The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (1982); John Winkler’s The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (1990); David Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990); Amy Richlin’s The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor; Marilyn B. Skinner and Judith P. Hallett’s edited volume Roman Sexualities (1992); and Craig A. Williams’s Roman Homosexuality (1999).
Foucault’s thinking was, in fact influenced by Dover’s classic study, especially Dover’s notion that the Greeks thought of sexual orientation not in terms of “same” (homo-) and “different” (hetero-), as was the case in Dover’s day, but in terms of other binaries including active/passive, dominant/submissive, and insertive/receptive. So in fact, the interest of Anglo-American classicists in developing new ways to understand gender and sexuality in classical antiquity is contemporary with, or even predates, Foucault’s influential work. What Foucault added, however, was the theoretical framework of social constructivism that so captured the imagination of gay and feminist scholars, among others, beginning in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s.
Into this scholarly and historical context comes this volume of ten essays revisiting the concept of the cinaedus in ancient Rome. The stated objective of the volume, as described by its co-editors, is to engage what the editors call “the Foucauldian on the ancient erotic experience,” with particular focus on exploring the notions of deviant gender and sexuality implied or suggested by the term cinaedus. As the editors state (p. 9),
We believe this volume, without questioning the validity of the “Foucauldian turn” and without trying to rekindle was is now a dated battle between opposite factions of ancient historians, nonetheless tries to probe both virtues and limits of Foucault’s interpretational frames, and most importantly concerning the figures of the ancient [Greek] kinaidos and the Roman cinaedus, ventures what remains the fundamental question: who were they?
The volume begins with Giulia Sissa’s thoughtful inquiry into the semantic range of kinaidia in the Greek context and the epistemological constraints imposed by the Foucauldian framing of deviant male sexuality in classical antiquity. Sissa’s essay provides a beneficially contextualizing introduction to the volume’s overall focus on Roman literature and culture.
Sissa contends that the binaries of active/passive and penetrating/penetrated, far from illuminating an adequate understanding of kinaidia, actually obscure our understanding. Sissa finds that in a range of Greek sources—including Aristophanes, Plato, Aeschines, and Aristotle—the kinaidos is reprehensible not because of his submission to anal penetration, or even his effeminacy, but because of the insatiability of his desire.
Tom Sapsford’s essay serves as a cross-cultural bridge of sorts from Greece to Italy as Sapsford explores the multiple dimensions of kinaidia reflected in Greek sources from imperial Rome. Sapsford examines two accounts of Cleomachus, a fourth century BCE Ionian boxer, both of which focus on incongruous transformations. In the Geography, the Greek historian Strabo recounts the transformation of Cleomachus from upright boxer to degenerate poet. In On the Pallidum by the Christian apologist Tertullian, the manly boxer becomes an effeminate transvestite. Sapsford argues that taken together, these accounts suggest a wider meaning for the term cinaedus beyond that of sex and gender deviant or, referencing the other common referent of the term, a particular type of professional lewd dancer.
John R. Clarke argues that some Roman visual artists of the late Republic and early Empire bypassed gender-conforming representations of sexual intimacy between an older male and a younger male (that is, the traditional Greek pederastic model) in favor of depicting adult males enjoying anal penetration (i.e. cinaedi). Clarke’s essay revisits material artifacts he analyzed in groundbreaking scholarship published some 20 years ago, applying a newly expanded focus on how viewers interacted with various objects and how such interactions might inform our understanding of the nonnormative sexual and gender performativity of the men portrayed thereon.
Tomasso Gazzarri contributes an essay on the sex and gender associations of the Latin color term galbinus, which sources describe as a yellowish green hue, perhaps akin to chartreuse. He reviews the appearance of this seldom-attested word in Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius. Gazzarri notes that the term was specifically associated with women and was considered unmanly. He suggests that if indeed cinaedi often sported garments of this yellowish green hue, one must consider the possibility that the color was a deliberate signifier of a feminine gender identity among such men. In effect, he argues for an understanding of cinaedus as a descriptor not necessarily of gender deviance only, but possibly of a self-defined and self-determined gender difference.
Judith P. Hallett and Donald Lateiner argue for a socially, culturally, and historically meaningful distinction between the referents of the Latin words cinaedus and pathicus. As they note, the term cinaedus was associated with a lascivious kineticism of the buttocks and lips, while the term pathicus was not.
Two chapters consider the figure of the cinaedus in Latin authors at opposites ends of the Roman historical spectrum, Plautus and Apuleius. Jesse Weiner explores the the semantic and semiotic range of the term cinaedus as evinced in the comedies of Plautus. Weiner argues that the meanings of cinaedus revolve around themes of humor, sexuality, gender performativity, intersectionality, and axes of power. In “The ‘Chorus Cinaedorum’ in Apuleius’ Golden Ass,” Benjamin Eldon Stevens examines the role of the sex-and-gender–deviant priests of Atargatis who purchase Lucius in Book 8. Stevens is intrigued by the idea, proposed by a number of scholars, that the priests may constitute an “intentional community,” perhaps reflecting the existence of a historical (as opposed to fictional) social subculture.
Two chapters explore questions of women in regard to the figure of the cinaedus. In “Did (Imaginary) Cinaedi Have Sex with Women?,” Kirk Ormand considers whether Romans understood the literary figure of the cinaedus to be homosexual or bisexual; that is, did Romans imagine that cinaedi, as represented in Roman literature (rather than Roman reality), experienced sexual desire for men only, or for both men and women? More specifically, did Romans imagine that the cinaedi of literature wanted both to be penetrated by men and to penetrate women, or only to be penetrated by men? Ormand thinks the latter (only to be penetrated by men), suggesting that “the figure of the ‘womanizing cinaedus’ is a misunderstanding of modern scholarship, produced when we read the momentary insults and playful paradoxes of invective as statements of lived identity.” (p. 252). Barbara K. Gold considers Catullus’s use at Carmina 10.24 of the comparative adjective cinaediorem to describe a woman whom the poet wishes to characterize not as a sexual deviant, but as a social deviant. Gold describes the poem as “a sophisticated examination of subjugation which occurs intersectionally along multiples lines” including gender, class, and ethnicity (p. 270).
The final chapter returns to the Greek context. In “Kinaidos: The Afterlife of a Term in the Byzantine Empire,” Mark Masterson surveys Greek lexicographies from the fifth to the tenth centuries, finding striking commonalities between the approaches of the Byzantine lexicographers and American classicists of recent decades. Where the Romans regularly conflated male sexual submissiveness with effeminacy, the Byzantines, like American classicists such as David Halperin and Jack Winkler, distinguished sexual activity from gender identity. For the likes of Halperin and Winkler in the United States, this was a matter of gay liberationist scholarship and literary criticism which ultimately morphed into queer theory. For the Byzantines, Masterson notes, this distinction was related to an understanding of sexuality based on religious and legal doctrine “in which sex between men is not necessarily associated with gender dissidence … and sees sex between men, most often anal, as a tempting thing that they should refuse.” (p. 275).
This is a worthy collection of essays exploring the intriguing questions that emerge when one attempts to identify the precise referent of the Greek term kinaidos and the Latin term cinaedus. For centuries if not millennia, philologists who studied ancient Greek and Latin texts, as well as Greek and Roman material culture, took these terms completely at face value, including the full range of their derogatory and stigmatizing implications. That began to change among British, European, and American scholars—particularly but not exclusively among gay and feminist scholars—in the last quarter of the last century. Soon we will be past the first quarter of the current century, and the time has more than come to include more recent feminist, intersectional, and queer theoretical concepts in our study of classical literature. This volume makes a valuable contribution to that end.
Authors and Titles
Introduction: Searching for the Cinaedus in Classical Antiquity (Tommaso Gazzarri and Jesse Weiner)
- Κιναίδων βίος: Ethics, Lifestyle, and Sensuality in Greek Erotic Culture (Giulia Sissa)
- Cleomachus: A Study in ‘Cinaedic’ Associations (Tom Sapsford)
- Representing the Cinaedus in Roman Visual Culture: Seeing, Speaking, Touching (John R. Clarke)
- Cinaedus Galbinatus: Cultural Perception of the Color ‘Green’ and Its Gender Association with Pathici in Rome (Tommaso Gazzarri)
- Connotation and ‘Com-motion’: Putting the Kinesis into the Roman Cinaedus (Judith P. Hallett and Donald Lateiner)
- The Kinaidos Comes to Rome: Plautus’ Cinaedi (Jesse Weiner)
- The ‘Chorus Cinaedorum’ in Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Benjamin Eldon Stevens)
- Did (Imaginary) Cinaedi Have Sex with Women? (Kirk Ormand)
- Can a Woman Be a Cinaedus? Interrogating Catullus 10 and Roman Social Norms (Barbara K. Gold)
- Kinaidos: The Afterlife of a Term in the Byzantine Empire (Mark Masterson)