Homosexuality and the Roman man [electronic resource] : a study in the cultural construction of sexuality. (Volumes I and II).

1992

1 online resource (511 p.)

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This dissertation aims to reconstruct the linguistic and cultural apparatuses for the categorization and evaluation of sexual experience between males that were shared by Romans as part of their cultural heritage. Making use of sources from the classical period (approximately 200 B.C. to A.D. 200) that range from such diverse literary texts as Plautus, Catullus, Cicero, Petronius, and Martial to the graffiti scratched on the walls of Pompeii, this study seeks to describe the dominant ideology of sexual behavior qua cultural product. A proposition that informs the entire discussion is that "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were not active categories within Roman cultural discourses on sexuality. Erotic behavior between members of the same sex was not conceived as a discrete area for the application of moral codes any more than was erotic behavior between males and females, defined as such. This dissertation thus seeks to demonstrate that its title is anachronistic. The first two chapters are concerned with the interaction between Greek and Roman culture, especially in the second and first centuries B.C., arguing that male homoeroticism was an unremarkable feature of Roman life from the earliest of times; what Romans identified as distinctly Greek in the area of sexual experience was the peculiarly Hellenic social practice of pederasty. The third chapter forms a pendant to this discussion, considering characteristically Roman aspects of surviving representations of erotic experience between males that can be connected with the lack of a pederastic tradition on the Greek (especially Athenian) model. The fourth chapter examines a code regulating men's sexual behavior that is encapsulated in the word Stuprum and that categorizes sexual acts on the basis not of gender-combinations but of the status of men's partners (free as opposed to slave). The fifth and sixth chapters examine a second code, centering on the physical and specifically phallocentric opposition between the active (insertive) and passive (receptive) roles in intercourse, that classifies sexual agents on the basis of the specific physical acts that they perform rather than on the gender of the persons with whom they perform those acts. The last chapter considers hints in the sources at the possibility of men's sharing erotic experience in ways that circumvented or disregarded this rigid penetrative code.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 1992.