Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

350 RABUN TAYLOR
or, more likely, to trade roles, though the dominant Roman culture only
acknowledged the fact grudgingly and with little understanding.
The growing awareness of homosexual reciprocity within the subculture
is visible in the very vocabulary of literary vituperation. It must bc
acknowledged up front, though, that the most common terms to describe
men of "pathic" inclination, such as mollis (soft) and cinaedus (effeminate
male) are sufficiently vague to suit the sweeping prejudices of
Roman men.'0' Martial's use of cinaedus is liberal proof that we cannot
reconstruct strict definitions of contemptuous terms. Only one of his
poems, 2.28, expressly confines cinaedi to playing the passive role in homosexual
intercourse. Two others (6.37, 12.16) emphasize the passive
role. Verse 3.73 emphasizes active or reciprocal roles. In 7.58 and 10.40,
cinaedi are impotent with women or uninterested in them; but in
6.39.12-13, a man's cinaedus concubine fathers one of his wife's children.
In 9.2 they are the product of castration-specifically, they are
Galli; in 6.16, the phallic god Priapus threatens cinaedi with the sickle,
implying that they are genitally intact. In 6.39, 9.90.7, 10.40, and
12.16, they are slaves; in 6.90, 7.58, and 9.63, they are free.
As nouns, mollis and cinaedus are roughly interchangeable, although
the latter is restricted to men who are past their teenage years. One of
Publilius Syrus's preserved maxims says, "Age hides the cinaedus, age reveals
him" ("aetas cinaedum celat, aetas indicat").102 This apparently
means that when a committed pathic passes into adulthood, he tries to
hide his behavior from society; but the conventional signposts of adult
pathics (pallor, depilation, etc.) reveal him for what he is. When mollisis
a modifier, it can often be read simply as the adjectival form of cinaedus
101 It is worth noticing that the British term "molly" refers to an cffeminatc man or a
malc prostitute. Whilc most etymologists accept this as the diminutivc of the namc Mary,
Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cspecially in the thcatcr, had a great influencc
on the language of the subculture. Thus in Elizabcthan times a malc prostitute or
a malc brothel is called "spintry"(from the rare Latin word spintria, an cxotic malc prostitute);
sec Waync Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality
(Ncw York, 1985), p. 23. For ctymologies, see the entrics in the Oxford En,glish Dictionary.
"Catamitc" meaning "kept boy" (from catamitus) first appears in 1593. It is possiblc, then,
that "molly" derives from mollis and likewise got its start in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, or
Rcstoration theater culturcs (it is not attested until the beginning of the cightecnth century),
which werc repositorics of classical Icarning and, likc theatcr culturcs in many socictics,
havens for a "sodomitical" subculturc (see Bray, pp. 54-55). Many derogatory terms
for mcmbers of a subculture are invented or prescrved by the mcmbers themsclves, not by
hostilc outsiders.
102 Guliclmus Meycr, ed., Publilii Syri mimi sententiac (Leipzig, 1880), p. 18, line 24.
However, R. A. H. Bickford-Smith, ed., Publilii Syri sententiac (London, 1895), p. 2, line
24, reads astus and aestus in the places of aetas.
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