Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

362 RABUN TAYLOR
behind when they entered married life or when their companions grew
up, but others, at great expense to their reputations, could not.
In the third century of our era, so many were the exokti in Rome that
they seem to have been publicly acknowledged as a class of prostitutes
alongside female meretrices and were taxed for the privilege (S.H.A.
Alex. Sev. 24.3-4). The emperor considered revoking their legal status
but declined to do so "lest by prohibiting a public [i.e., officially recognized]
disgrace he should convert it into private debauchery" ("ne prohibens
publicum dedecus in privatas cupiditates converteret"). Any real
difference between "public" and "private" relationships was probably illusory.
The term exoletus is as charged with disapprobation as cinaedus. Despite
their apparent legality, relationships with adult catamites are cast in
a sallow light by Roman authors; one's possession or lease of an exoletus
inevitably casts suspicion on the strict partition of sexual roles in the relationship.
This suspicion probably lurks behind Cicero's condemnation
of the "steadfast matrimony" of Antony and Curio, which could exist so
easily under the guise of friendship or patronage.
To maintain a measure of propriety, some men had to establish the
arrangement in a socially acceptable but rather artificial guise, such as
ownership or patronage (a tricky proposition, as patronage was supposed
to be chaste). Ancient relationships between coevals are "expressions
of an attachment that existed outside the erastes/eromenos [lover/
beloved] relationship-an attachment largely if not totally of a sexual
kind that found it convenient to seek sexual release in homosexual ways
and with a degree of mutuality denied to the more formal affair." 146
There does seem to have been some advantage to drawing a formal
distinction between prostitution and patronage,147 even if the distinction
was artificial-probably because a legally recognized male prostitute was
required to pay a prostitution tax, and patronage was more respectable
anyway. Naevolus, the aging bedmate of the wealthy Virro in Juvenal's
ninth satire, apparently was picked up in a bath; Virro solicited him when
he saw him naked, and slavered over "the unimagined immensity of that
giant prick" ("longi mensura incognita nervi"; Juv. 9.34; cf. 9.33-37).
Although we are not told how Virro views the relationship, he does give
Naevolus money; yet Naevolus goes so far as to call himself a client
(9.59, 72) and enumerates the services he has rendered his "patron,"
all of which are sexual in nature. From Naevolus's perspective at least,
"46Richardson(n. 4 above), p. 113.
147 "Circc"'s maid in Petronius 126 offers Encolpius his choice of two agrcements: "So
if you sell us what I'm after, therc is a buyer at hand, but if you do the more generous thing
and oblige her for free, I will owe you a favor [bccnficium]."
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