Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

348 RABUN TAYLOR
Empire, "those who tampered with the most visible variables of masculinity
in their self-presentation provoked vehement moral criticism because
they were rightly suspected of undermining the symbolic language
in which male privilege was written."95 The second-century C.E. physician
Soranus's treatise On Acute and Chronic Diseases characterizes the
condition of gaXOaKcof, translated into Latin as "soft men, that is, pathics"
(Caelius Aurelianus, De morbis acutis et chronicis 4.9.131), as a frenetic
behavioral dysfunction, indeed "the passion of a wicked and utterly
debased mind" ("malignae ac foedissimae mentis passio"; 4.9.132).
Such usage may ultimately spring from deep-seated cultural anxiety
about the fragility of manhood, the "flickering heat" articulated by Galen
and others, but it should not be divorced from cruder notions about
lechery.96 The image of the New Pathic-along with ancillary associations
of pallor, disease, exhaustion, and sexual overindulgence-are all
combined into one imprecise character stereotype. The most important
ingredient of this persona, however, is that he is exclusively or primarily
interested in adult males or mature teenagers; and this is usually translated,
rightly or wrongly, into the desire to be penetrated.
Eighteenth-century Europeans associated the rise of "sodomitical"
subcultures with evil omen and foreign influence. The Dutch blamed it
on the French; its omens included stock-market woes, fevers, storms,
plagues, and worms gnawing at the dikes. The British blamed it on Italian
Catholics; their mythology embraced werewolves, basilisks, sorcerers,
and popery. In Paris, men could be arrested simply for being in
notorious places at certain times or for conversing with known sodomites;
a man's taste for company and his social habits became a measure
of his sexuality. The Romans blamed "unnatural" homosexual acts on
Greece or the barbarians, and Juvenal deemed it a monstrum, as if "a
woman bore a calf, or a cow a lamb" (2.123). All seem to have arrived
at this pitch of hysteria because of the gradual recognition of male homosexuality
as an institution and lifestyle rather than simply an aberrant
late juristic reconstructions of the lcx Iulia are spurious Icads her-rather precipitously-to
dissociate the law entirely from homosexual behavior (pp. 142-45). On stuprum, sce also
Krenkel (n. 55 above), pp. 181-82.
95 Gleason (n. 12 above), p. 401.
960n viri mollcs, sce Dalla, pp. 33-35; P. H. Schrijvcrs, Eine mcdizinischc Erkilarung
der mannlichen Homosexualitat aus der Antike (Caclius Aurelianus DE MORIBUS
CHRONICIS IV 9) (Amsterdam, 1985); Dr. Schramm, "Viri Molles: Geistesstorung im
Altcrtum," Archiv, Deutsche Gcscilschaft fir Psychiatric und gcrichtlichc Psychologic 17
(1870): 19-37. An cxccllcnt study of gendcr paradigms in ancient literature, particularly
in trcatises on mcdicinc and nature, may be found in Glcason. On the ancicnt physiology
of manhood, see Petcr Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation
in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), csp. pp. 10-19.
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