Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

326 RABUN TAYLOR
context of the anthropological evidence is unlikely to ascribe to it a
purely Greek origin.'8 Greece and Rome are only two among many
cultures that attach shame and disenfranchisement to the passive role.
Richlin's image of the socially marginal, "stained" pathic of Roman
literature-a grown man who degrades himself by oral-genital contact
and by accommodating the penises of men'9-is endemic to many societies,
as is the tension between the desire to play the passive role and the
social pressure not to acknowledge it. The result, as we see through the
admittedly biased harangues of Martial, Juvenal, and the phallic poems
of the Priapea, as well as the equally distorted lens of Cicero and Seneca,
is that some men openly flaunt their homosexuality, while others fearfully
hide it. A good deal of discussion has recently surrounded the Warren
Cup, an Augustan relief goblet featuring (in one of its two tableaux)
two males, apparently of equal age, nestled in anal coitus as a man or boy
in a tunic looks on from behind a partly opened door.20 To my mind, the
scene is the visual equivalent of a Martial epigram or Juvenal's second
satire: the two protagonists, of a Hellenized, heroic cast, face exposure
of their 'crime"-intercourse between freeborn males-by a voyeur
who is meant to represent you and me. Both partners have something to
hide here: the passive partner is tainted by his pathic act, and the penetrator
is encouraging his corruption. The Apollonian features of the
scene, the elder partner's laurel crown and a lyre resting nearby, suggest
a satirization of the family of Augustus, which often adopted this imagery
in its official art.2'
Literary sources such as Juvenal and Martial give liberal evidence that
some "butch" men took the pathic role in private. In many societies,
tion. At least two classical sources suggest this is truc: the clder Seneca asserts that castrating
young boys for prostitution is contra naturam (Controv. 1.4.17), and on the same topic,
Petronius says, "nature sceks herself and findeth naught" (119.1.24).
"'Williams, pp. 11-119; Cantarella; Lilja (n. 2 abovc), pp. 82, 123-24. Verstracte's argumcnt
that Rome had undergone centuries of Greck influence through the Etruscans and
Magna Graecia is well taken ("Slavery and the Social Dynamics of Male Homosexual Relations
in Ancicnt Rome," p. 230). But given the paucity of early evidencc, his claim that
"we sec from the late third century B.C. onwards an incrcasing acceptance of alternative
sexual behaviors of almost every coloring and varicty" (p. 230) is tcnuous and is plainly
wrong if hc means that the dominant culturc, as opposed to the subculturc, accepted any
of these behaviors.
'9Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, pp. 26-31; sec also Williams, pp. 206-80.
20John Clarkc, "The Warrcn Cup and the Contexts for Reprcsentations of Malc-to-
Malc Lovemaking in Augustan and Early Julio-Claudian Art," Art Bulletin 75 (1993):
275-93. In The Houses of Roman Italy: Ritual, Space, and Decoration (Berkeley, 1991), pp.
323-24), Clarke suggests that the scene represents a homosexual brothel, but therc is no
reason why it could not be a private house.
21
Paul Zankcr, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, MI, 1988).
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