Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

320 RABUN TAYLOR
invoked a savage moralism targeting the New Pathic, a once harmless
(if detested) character now marked as an obnoxious threat. Behind the
paranoia lies a case study for the development of homosexual subcultures
in the face of adversity.
Although four extensive treatments of Roman male homosexualityby
John Boswell, Saara Lilja, Eva Cantarella, and Amy Richlin-exist in
book form, only Lilja's is exclusively devoted to this topic and hers alone
takes adequate stock of the change in attitudes and behavior during the
early period of Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean. The best and
most comprehensive treatment of the topic is Craig Williams's 1992 dissertation,
"Homosexuality and the Roman Man" which, however, denies
any substantive change in the Roman sexual identity during the
historical period.2 All these works emphasize societal attitudes toward
sexual behavior. But Richlin has recently opened up a new dimension of
the study of ancient sexuality, the Roman homosexual subculture, in the
pages of this journal.3 The present article builds on Richlin's recent work;
it seeks to characterize not just the attitudes of the dominant culture but
the behavior of the subculture as well. What was it like on the inside of
same-sex adult male relationships in Rome? Time and again, a full answer
to this question is frustrated by the unfriendly bias of the sources. Of all
the surviving literature from the Roman period, only Petronius's Satyricon
offers a sympathetic view of homosexual relationships between
coevals.4 Even Richlin7s admirable article, which aspires to "flesh out the
2John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980);
Saara Lil'a, Homosexuality in Republican and Augustan Rome (Helsinki, 1982); Amy Richlin,
The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (New Haven, CT,
1983); Craig A. Williams, "Homosexuality and the Roman Man: A Study in the Cultural
Construction of Sexuality" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1992); and Eva Cantarella, Bisexuality
in the Ancicnt World, trans. C. O'Cuilleanain (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992).
See also Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality (Philadelphia, PA, 1983).
Another study, Franqoise Gonfroy, "Un fait de civilisation m&connu: L'homosexualite masculine
a Rome" (diss., Poitiers, 1972), remains unpublished. Since Boswell claims that Roman
society condoned homosexual activity from the very beginning of its recorded history,
he is naturally troubled by what he sees as the sudden onset of homophobia in the early
Christian period (pp. 61-87, 91). Cantarella adopts Paul Veyne's view (see n. 15 below)
that the period of the Empire witnessed a slow but profound change from aggressivc malc
bisexual libertinism to an ethic of heterosexual fidelity. But although she devotes a chaptcr
of her book to the metamorphoses of sexual cthics in the Greco-Roman world, in that
chapter she deals only with the late empire and the onset of Christianity.
3Amy Richlin, "Not before Homosexuality: The Matcriality of the Cinaedus and the
Roman Law against Love between Men," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993):
523-73.
4Williams, pp. 341-49; T. Wade Richardson, "Homosexuality in the Satyricon," Classica
et Mediaevalia 35 (1984): 105-27.
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