Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome 345
and in smaller towns throughout Europe for centuries, these rather
loose social structures bore little resemblance to a full-blown subculture;
they went virtually unnoticed by the greater population and lent little
sense of identity to their members.80 The anonymity of a large city and
the newly perceived strength of numbers among homosexual men seem
to have encouraged the rise of Molly-houses, establishments that combined
the social functions of modern gay bars and gay bathhouses.
The apparent rise of Rome's subculture was likewise attendant upon
a rapid increase in population, which took place during and after the
eastern conquests of the second century B.C.E. and rendered the city
comparable in size to eighteenth-century London by the first century
B.C.E.8' The homosexual subculture of urban society came into existence
not by conscious selection but by a trickle-down effect from the population
at large, which needed to reach a certain size before the networks
of homosexual men could come together in a gradual realization of their
numbers and unique cultural properties. The combination of tremendous
urban growth and the influx of a more sexually self-aware Greek
population augmented social activity among "pathic" men in the city of
Rome. Such men as the elder Cato and even the Hellenophile younger
Scipio observed these developments with displeasure.82 The huge increase
in the slave population also played its part; through ownership or
prostitution, "slavery afforded wide possibilities for satisfaction of every
free male's needs or predilections."83
The mainstream notion of homosexual males as rapacious pathics and
effeminates appears to have arrived with the Roman subculture, as it did
to a lesser extent with London's.84 Aristocratic and domestic effeminates
in the Greek style begin appearing in Rome during or shortly after Plautus's
time, as we know from various fragments attributed to the elder
Cato.85 Cato opposes the erection of statues of certain men because they
century (see Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance
Venice [New York, 1985]). Fantham draws many interesting parallels between Rome's
sexual climate and that of Venice.
80Trumbach, 'Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution
of the Eighteenth Century," p. 116.
8"Picrrc Salmon, Population et depopulation dans l'Empire romain (Brussels, 1974),
p. 15.
82Fantham, p. 288; Williams (n. 2 above), p. 221.
83Verstraete, "Slavery and the Social Dynamics of Male Homosexual Relations in Ancient
Rome" (n. 15 above), p. 231.
"4Trumbach, "Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual Development in
Eighteenth-Century London," p. 408. The earliest datable occurrences of the word pathicus
are in Catull. 16.2, 57.2, and 112.2.
"5Collected in Fantham, p. 288.
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