Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

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Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome 329 outlets and as shields for socially taboo behaviors-behaviors that could occasionally be seen as such a threat that the cults were banned and their adherents persecuted.27 The most famous instance is the persecution of the Italian cult of Dionysus in 186 B.C.E., recorded in book 39 of Livy's Roman history. Among the accusations leveled at the participants was an orgy of homosexual activity among both sexes. The cult involved more than seven thousand men and women, many of them plebeians; its leaders were of that class. The Roman state arrested and executed a majority of the participants and virtually eradicated the cult (39.13-18). As an instance of the fear and loathing generated by eastern cults we have a very curious poem in the Appendix Vergiliana (Vergil Catal. 13) that some have attributed to Horace and may refer to Antony, whom Cicero had branded a cinaedus ("effeminate") in the Philippics.28 The poem's addressee is "Lucienus," now a grown man, who has lived a debauched and improvident life since his youth, "when the boy's dinner parties were spent with men, / and his buns stayed wet through the night" (13-14).29 In his adulthood he has become a transvestite priest of Cotytto, the goddess of a Thracian mystery cult: Why do you blanch, you woman? Do my jests pain you? Or do you see what you have done? During the rites of lovely Cotytto you won't invite me for the long unused phallic charms, nor at that time will I see you move your loins inside your woman's dress as you hold the altar tight, or as you call to men reeking sailor-stench by the yellow Tiber, where the harbored ships stand in the shallows, stuck [retentae = grown limp30] in the fetid mire, and struggle in the meager waters; nor even on the oily Compitalia will you lead me to the kitchen with its paltry dinner fare when, overflowing with dinner and with drool, you return to your hungry wife and handily purge your burning bowels, and to her disgust you pucker and you lick. Now strike back [laede = bang away], now provoke [ lacesse = 27For more on Greek and Roman mystery cults, see Clara Gallini, Protesta e integrazione nella Roma antica (Bari, 1970), pp. 30-44; Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in ClassicalAntiquity (New York, 1975), pp. 205-26; and J. A. North, "Religious Toleration in Republican Rome," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, n.s., 25 (1979): 85-103, at 94-95. 28See H. Rushton Fairclough, trans., Virgil, Loeb Classical Library (1934), 2.505. 29"Vel acta puero cum viris convivia / udacque per somnum nates" (Verg. Catal. 13- 14). This seems to be an instance of sexual patronage. The act is deemed perverse in light of the Roman custom of not allowing boys to recline at meals with adults until they assumed the toga virilis; see Alan Booth, "The Age for Reclining and Its Attendant Perils," in Dining in a Classical Context, ed. William J. Slater (Ann Arbor, MI, 1991), pp. 105-20. 30This is the perfect passive participle of either retineo, "hold back," or retendo, "release from tension." This content downloaded from 71.172.231.156 on Wed, 24 Jul 2013 18:27:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
330 RABUN TAYLOR arouse] me, if your strength allows! I'll even let out your name: cinaedus Lucienus, your strength is flagging, your molars grind with hunger. I will see you when you have nothing left but your lolling brothers [fratres = male lovers],3' an angry Jupiter, a split belly [ventrem = loins] and the hunger-swollen feet of a herniated uncle !32 The welter of double entendres and stinging insults in this breathless diatribe associates the cinaedus with the transvestism and pathic sexual behavior of an urban subculture of sailors and fratres. In the secrecy of the orgiastic rites of the Cotytia, Lucienus and his kind dress as women; their membra virilia hang unused (hence the unused fascini, apotropaic phallic charms worn by Roman boys, acquire a reverse symbolism), but they are driven to exhaustion offering themselves up as partners to sailors (until the latter "grow limp" in the "fetid mire"?).33 During the Compitalia festival, Lucienus's secret "dinner fare" is more of the same. He goes home and purges;34 he simply cannot be aroused by his wife and resorts to cunnilingus.35 The supposed rewards for the lifestyle of the cinaedus are split loins (rather like the "gay bowel syndrome" of modern homophobic tracts), angry gods, and neglected dependents. The real story of transvestite cultic activity is of course much more complicated. The first of the two homosexual subcultures in our discussion is embedded in a ritual framework that ironically emphasizes chastity. It is a group of Hellenized Anatolian fertility cults that became fashionable in Rome during the late Republic. The two largest individual cults in this group, those of magna mater (Cybele) and of the dea Syria 31As examples of this usage, Gaston Vorberg, Glossarium Eroticum (Rome, 1965), s.v. frater, cites Tibullus 3.1.23; Mart. 2.4.3; 10.65.15; Petron. 9. See also Williams, pp. 342-49. 32 "Quid palluisti, femina? an ioci dolent? / an facta cognoscis tua? / non me vocabis pulchra per Cotytia / ad feriatos fascinos, / nec deinde te movere lumbos in stola / prensis videbo altaribus / flavumque propter Thybrim olentis nauticum / vocare, ubi adpulsae rates / stant in vadis caeno retentae sordido / macraque luctantes aqua; / neque in culinam et uncta compitalia / dapesque duces sordidas, / quibus repletus et salivosis aquis, / obesam ad uxorem redis / et aestuantes docte solvis pantices, / osusque lambis saviis. / nunc laede, nunc lacesse, si quicquam vales! / et nomen adscribo tuum. / cinaede Luciene, liquerunt opes / fameque genuini crepant. / videbo habentem praeter ignavos nihil / fratres et iratum Iovem / scissumque ventrem et herniosi patrui / pedes inedia turgidos" (Verg. Catal. 13.17-40). 33For more direct imagery, see Priapea 68.8; Juv. 9.44; CIL X.4483. 34For the laxative effect of anal penetration, see Priapea 17; Martial 11.88 and 13.26. 35Lucienus's wife seems nothing more than a lugubrious concession to the dominant culture. Compare Ausonius's epigram 78 and the wife of a long string of cinaedi in Martial 7.58.3-5: "Then, having tested their loins and dongs like wet thongs uncoaxed to a stand by your long-laboring hand, you desert weaponless bed and effeminate husband alike." This content downloaded from 71.172.231.156 on Wed, 24 Jul 2013 18:27:33 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

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