Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

344 RABUN TAYLOR
by freeborn males was being enforced.76 But Roman comedy may also
reflect the values and necessities of the largely agrarian and familydominated
society of preimperial Rome, which also prevail in John
D'Emilio's vision of the preindustrial West in modern times.77 The development
of Rome's public, military, and commercial institutions and
the increase in enslavement and patronage after the Second Punic War
created a situation that devalued the Roman nuclear family, especially
among the freeborn, and allowed many men (although perhaps very few
women) to pursue sexualities outside of the family context.
Here we turn our discussion to early modern London, which reveals
some interesting parallels with Rome in the late Republic and early Empire.
Prior to the emergence of the subculture in London, sodomy was
not associated with men of exclusively homosexual bent, but with general
debauchees who were prone to drunkenness, gluttony, idleness, and
indiscriminate bisexual lechery. Randolph Trumbach goes so far as to
define a perceived type, the Elizabethan or Jacobean London libertine
"with his mistress on one arm and his catamite on the other."78 It is easy
to see the parallels here to the character type in Roman comedy.
Trumbach suggests that London's rapid growth in population in the
eighteenth century, paralleled in other European cities, enabled the subculture
to emerge in full only when the population reached about
500,000.79 Although "sodomitical" networks had existed in London
16The seduction of young freeborn males was considered a crime punishablc by death.
Valerius Maximus (6.1) records several early instances. In 226 B.C.E., a certain Capitolinus
was condemned in a casc of pudicitiac quaestio (trial of chastity) for seducing a frceborn
boy (6.1.7). Similarly, in the early third century B.C.E., M. Laetorius Mergus committed
suicidc when he was accused of trying to seduce a subordinate but was condemned posthumously
(6. 1.1 1). These and the other cases that Valerius cites have been explained as mattcrs
of rape or assault rather than of sexual behavior per se. But a freeborn boy's loss of his
chastity was a deadly serious matter, regardless of how it camc about. In 108 B.C.E., Q.
Fabius Maximus Eburnus killed his own son, whom he claimed was "of qucstionablc chastity"
(dubiac castitatis; 6.1.5), meaning he had probably submitted to seduction. This is
not a mattcr of assault but of personal defilement; the son's misstcp was to manifcst his
weakness of character by assuming the sexual role of a slave. Sce Michael Gray-Fow, "Pedcrasty,
the Scantinian Law, and the Roman Army," Journal of Psychohistory 13 (1986): 449-
60. For a comprehensive evaluation of the legal dimension of such activity, see Fantham
(n. 17 abovc).
" John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Making Troubk: Essays on Gay History,
Politics, and the University, ed. John D'Emilio (New York, 1992), pp. 3-16.
8Bray (n. 10 above), p. 16; Randolph Trumbach, "Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical
Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography,'
in 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert
P. Maccubbin (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 109-21, at p. 116.
79Randolph Trumbach, "Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Rolc, and Sexual Development
in Eightcenth-Century London," in Gerard and Hekma, eds. (n. 64 above), pp. 407-32,
at p. 408. Thc first full European homosexual subculture arose in Venice in the fiftecnth
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