University of Texas Press

Not before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love
between Men
Author(s): Amy Richlin
Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Apr., 1993), pp. 523-573
Published by: University of Texas Press
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Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of
the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against

Love between Men
AMY RICHLIN
Classics Department
University of Southern California
"Who is the degenerate general? Who is the man who seeks another man?
Who is the man who scratches his head with one finger?" [Clodius heck-
ling Pompey (56 b.c), as described by Plutarch (early second century a.d),
Life of Pompey 48.7]1
Leave the rest for sexy girls

And whatever not-man seeks to have a man.
[Ovid on the limits of male grooming (1 b.c), Ars
Amatoria 1.523-24]
Why Speak
It is A commonplace of women's history that the act of writing

has belonged to men. The structure of institutions?law, government,
I dedicate this article to the memory of John J. Winkler; I wish he were here to argue
with in person. The editors and readers for/HS provided the level of constructive criticism
of which a writer usually only dreams. Andrew Walker kindly sent me a copy of his mas-
ter's thesis on censorial speeches; John Clarke, Catharine Edwards, and David Konstan al?
lowed me to see work in progress. Thomas A. J. McGinn's extraordinary generosity and
legal expertise contributed much to my discussion of Roman law. Thanks for their help to
my colleagues Carolyn Dewald, Thomas Habinek, Donald McGuire, Gregory Thalmann,
and Roger Woodard; to David Konstan and Marilyn Skinner for detailed comments; and
to Walter Williams, who always tells me the glass is half full.
translations throughout are my own. This article is dotted with abbreviations stan?
dard in the field of classics, but probably unfamiliar outside it. Lists may be found at the
beginning ofthe Oxford Classical Dictionary or the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Texts are con-
veniently translated in the Loeb Classical Libraryseries. In addition, the reader's attention
is directed particularly to two new translations of hard-to-find texts: W. H. Parker, trans.
and ed., Priapea: Poemsfor a Phallic God (London, 1988); and Theodor Mommsen, Paul
Krueger, and Alan Watson, eds., The Digest of Justinian (Philadelphia, 1985).
[Journalofthe Historyof Sexuality1993, vol. 3, no. 4]

?1993 by The Universityof Chicago.All rightsreserved.1043-4070/93/0304-0001
$01.00
523

524 Amy Richlin
the family, religion?is replicated by the structure of representation, so

that the pen and ink and printed page are male, while the female page,
blank, speaks through silence. We know that this is an instance (or per?
haps the origin) of a more general model, in which representation be?
longs to the dominant group, silence to the marginal. Examples can too
easily be multiplied, and they make it obvious that not all men own
words. Take, for example, one group of men in ancient Rome: those
who liked to be sexually penetrated by other men. A historian might
doubt their very existence, attested as it is only by hostile sources. Alter-
natively, as I will do here, it might be argued that there was such a
group of men. Along with women?to whom they were consistently
likened?they participate in silence: one even more total than Roman
women's, since they have left, and perhaps wrote, no poems, no letters,
no history of their own. But perhaps this history may be reconstructed,
and the hostility of the sources be considered as a fact of these men's
lives.2
I bring this up because their existence is obscured, not only by silence
in current mainstream ancient history, but by much more surprising em-
2The most recent general studies are Amy Richlin, The Garden ofPriapus: Sexuality and
Aggression in Roman Humor (New Haven, CT, 1983; rev. ed., New York, 1992),passim, es?
pecially pp. 34-44, 220-26, 287-91; and Saara Lilja, Homosexuality in Republican and
Augustan Rome, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, no. 74 (Finnish Society of
Sciences and Letters, 1983). On homosexuality and Roman law, see the collection of
sources in Danilo Dalla, ccUbiVenusMutatur": Omosessualitae Diritto nelMondo Romano
(Milan, 1987); on Roman rape law, Elaine Fantham, "Stuprum:Public Attitudes and Pen?
alties for Sexual Offences in Republican Rome," EchosduMonde ClassiquelClassical Views
35, n.s. 10(1991): 267-91. See also John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance,and Ho?
mosexuality (Chicago, 1980), pp. 3-87, 119-36, strengthened by John Boswell, "Con-
cepts, Experience, and Sexuality," Differences 2 (1990): 67-87, which includes important
theoretical formulations. Jasper Griffin, in "Augustan Poetry and the Life of Luxury,"
Journal of Roman Studies 66 (1976): 87-104, especially pp. 96-104, argues against those
who claimed Roman homoerotic poetry had no real-life referent; Ramsay MacMullen, in
"Roman Attitudes to Greek Love," Historia 31 (1982): 484-502, argues, against Boswell,
that both pederasty and passive homosexuality were frowned upon by some Romans; both
present a wealth of supportive material. Refuting the thesis that Roman homosexuality was
a borrowing from the Greek, see Craig Williams, "Homosexuality and the Roman Man: A
Study in the Cultural Construction of Sexuality" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1992). Less
reliable are Michael Gray-Fow, "Pederasty, the Scantinian Law, and the Roman Army,"
Journal ofPsychohistory13 (1986): 449-60; Aline Rousselle, "Personal Status and Sexual
Practice in the Roman Empire," Zone 5, Fragmentsfor a History ofthe Human Body, Part 3
(New York, 1989), pp. 301-33; Beert C. Verstraete, "Slavery and the Social Dynamics of
Male Homosexual Relations in Ancient Rome," Journal of Homosexuality 5 (1980): 227-
36; Paul Veyne, "L'homosexualite a Rome," Communications35 (1982): 26-33. On lesbi?
ans at Rome, see Judith P. Hallett, "Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman
Reality in Latin Literature," Tale Journal of Criticism 3 (1989): 209-27; legal sources are
collected in Dalla, pp. 215-21.

Not Before Homosexuality 525
phases in the new Foucaultian accounts of ancient sexuality, which deal

with Rome as an extension of "Greece." Foucault's famous formulation
states that "as defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy
was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more
than the juridical subject of them"?as opposed to the "homosexual," a
being created by the nineteenth century, who "became a personage, a
past, a case history . . . a type of life . . . with an indiscreet anatomy and
possibly a mysterious physiology." Foucault is distinguishing, that is,
between behavior and essence: "The sodomite had been a temporary ab-
erration; the homosexual was now a species." The accounts within
classics?primarily those of John J. Winkler in The Constraints of Desire
and David Halperin in One Hundred Tears of Homosexuality?start
from this axiom and from the broader Foucaultian claim that sexuality,
and thus homosexuality, are social constructions.3
The model they create has much with which I would agree and much
which I will argue is not adequate to describe the ancient evidence. The
firm starting point is that the modern term "homosexuality" cannot be
used of Greek or Roman sexual practice without a good deal of qualifica-
tion.4 Neither Greeks nor Romans divided sexual encounters for men
across the board into same-sex (bad) versus difFerent-sex (good); it was
normal for adult male Romans to love both women and boys (pueri),
and erotic poetry occasionally lists the advantages of boys over women.
But it is also true that the Romans drew a sharp line between man + boy
(good, at least for the man) and man -f man (bad). (Note that the point
of view is always that ofthe adult male, the penetrator. Even I write "the
Romans" when I am talking about the Romans whose texts we have.) It
is, then, not possible to make a statement such as "homosexuality was
condoned in antiquity" or to say "the emperor Nero was a homosex?
ual"; our term is too broad. Both Halperin and Winkler, drawing on the
earlier work of K. J. Dover, go on to map out some of the features of
sexual relations between Greek males, particularly the marked ancient
differentiation between active/penetrating and passive/penetrated, and
the way in which participants in Athenian pederasty moved through
stages, from passive in adolescence to active later on. Halperin devotes a
3Quotations are from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality:An Introduction, vol. 1
of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), p. 43. Cf. David
Halperin, One Hundred Tears ofHomosexuality (New York, 1990), pp. 6-9,15-71; John
J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (New York, 1990), pp. 3-4. Numerous joint reviews
of Halperin and Winkler have appeared; see John Thorp, "The Social Construction ofHo?
mosexuality," Phoenix 46 (1992): 54-61, for an argument on homosexuality in Athens
similar to the one put forward here for Rome; for a feminist critique, see Amy Richlin,
"Zeus and Metis: Foucault, Feminism, Classics," Helios 18 (1991): 160-80.
4This argument is spelled out by Halperin, p. 7.

526 Amy Richlin
chapter to Athenian male prostitution; Winkler devotes a chapter to the

rhetorical use of the figure he calls the kinaidos, the male who is pene-
trated by another male. Both scholars manifest a strong concern to view
Greek society in its own terms, and the results make obsolete studies
that use "homosexuality" in the old, unexamined, twentieth-century
sense.5 At the same time, and despite the title of Halperin's book (which
refers to the coinage ofthe term "homosexual" in 1892), he will occa-
sionally say that there was "homosexuality" in antiquity.6
Some of their claims are less tenable. "Homosexuality" is said to be
so much a modern production that nothing like it can be found in classi?
cal antiquity; I will argue that "homosexual" in fact describes, in Roman
terms, the male penetrated by choice.7 Penetration was always the act of
an adult male, and Greeks and Romans often conceptualized this sort of
sexuality in terms of male-male relations, as for example in the epigraphs
to this article.8 Whereas "homosexuality" focuses on the gender ofa per-
son's sexual object, Halperin and Winkler claim this not to have been an
issue in antiquity; other things are more important, or important in?
stead: penetration, betrayal of citizen status, political maneuvering,
male/female polarities.9 These "either-or" formulations would be much
5On the distinction between active and passive, see Halperin, pp. 16, 33, 47, and
Winkler, pp. 39-40, 50-52; on the stages of pederasty, see Halperin, pp. 20, 47, and
Winkler, p. 53; the "real issue" is to see ancient cultures in their own terms?see Halperin,
p. 29, and cf. Winkler, pp. 1-13; the Greeks did have sex/gender rules, just different
ones?see Halperin, p. 36. See Halperin on male prostitution, pp. 88-112; see Winkler
on the kinaidos, pp. 45-70.
6Halperin: "It is not exactly my intention to argue that homosexuality, as we com?
monly understand it today, didn't exist before 1892. How, indeed, could it have failed to
exist?" (p. 17); similarly, "It is not, strictly speaking, incorrect to predicate that term
['homosexual'] of some classical Greeks" (p. 28); cf. p. 29.
7Cf. Halperin: "Homosexuality and heterosexuality, as we currently understand them,
are modern, Western, bourgeois productions. Nothing resembling them can be found in
classical antiquity" (p. 8); "It may well be that homosexuality properly speaking has no his?
tory of its own outside the West or much before the beginning of our century" (p. 18);
"Homosexuality presupposes sexuality, and sexuality itself. .. is a modern invention"
(p. 24). Likewise Winkler, summing up Foucault and citing Halperin: "It is impossible
therefore to have, say, a history of homosexuality, since neither it nor heterosexuality nor
even sexuality are timeless facts of human nature (Halperin 1989)" (p. 4).
8See Amy Richlin, "The Meaning oflrrumare in Catullus and Martial," Classical Phi?
lology 76 (1981): 40-46; Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, chaps. 2-Spassim, app. 2; Marilyn B.
Skinner, "Parasites and Strange Bedfellows: A Study in Catullus' Political Imagery,"
Ramus 8 (1979): 137-52; and Marilyn B. Skinner, "Pretty Lesbius," Transactionsofthe
American Philological Association 112 (1982): 197-208.
9Halperin insists that the medical text of Caelius Aurelianus, in its discussion of molles,
is concerned not with same-sex orientation but with penetration: "not the desire ... for
sexual contact with a person ofthe same sex," "nothing medically problematical" (pp. 22-
23); he treats male prostitution as a "betrayal of communal solidarity" (p. 95). Winkler,

better replaced by "both-and." Both Winkler and Halperin insist that

there was no concept of fixed sexual types in antiquity, in the teeth of ev?
idence they present themselves.10 They make an assortment of denials:
Halperin's analysis of a speech by the character Aristophanes in Plato's
Symposium leads him to argue that reciprocal desire between males is a
concept unknown to Aristophanes;11 it is several times said that sexual
desire was not attributed to males who chose to be penetrated (and sev?
eral times said that it was);12 it is several times hinted that the kinaidos
was an imaginary figure,13 and very little space is devoted to the real-life
existence of such men, who are elbowed out ofthe way by pederasty.14
summing up his chapter on the kinaidos, says: "The standards of rigor had virtually noth?
ing to do with actually regulating men's sexual behavior, but were a means of insuring a
certain image of public authority and allowed the elite to attack each other out of motives
that were essentially political rather than moral" (p. 11); he repeats this stress on the politi?
cal function of accusations of unmanliness (pp. 46, 59); the dichotomy between active and
passive male "rests on a more fundamental polarity between men and women" (p. 50).
10Halperin: "far from having a fixed and determinate sexual identity" (p. 24); "no no?
tion that human beings are individuated at the level of their sexuality" (p. 26); "it never oc?
curred to pre-modern cultures to ascribe a person's sexual tastes to some positive,
structural, or constitutive feature of his or her personality" (p. 27). Contrast this statement
by Halperin: "Plenty of ancient evidence testifles to the strength of individual preferences
for a sexual object of one sex rather than another" (p. 34n). Winkler focuses his attention
on the argurnent that "unnatural" in antiquity had a meaning different from its modern
meaning (pp. 17-44, 64-70); cf. p. 46, on the non-fixity of explanations ofthe nature of
kinaidoi.
1
halperin, pp. 18-21; likewise Caelius Aurelianus's medical text "displays the same
remarkable innocence of modern sexual categories" (p. 22). It is unclear why these two
texts are singled out (Caelius is "the other document from antiquity that might seem to
vouch for the existence ... of homosexuality" [p. 21]). For a detailed critique, see Thorp,
pp. 58-61.
12Yes,they have desire?Halperin: "niolles... insofar as they actively desire to be sub-
jected" (p. 22); Winkler: "kinaidoi were automatically assumed ... to desire to be pene-
trated by other men" (p. 52n). No, no desire?Halperin: on possible motives for
prostituting oneself, "sexual desire is never mentioned as a possible motive" (p. 97; a sin?
gle counterexample is given, p. 186 n. 78); Winkler, on the same topic: "sexual desireis ex-
cluded as a motive" (p. 58n); likewise, "Aiskhines never suggests that desire could be a
motive for prostitution" (p. 64; a "unique" counterexample?not Halperin's?is given in
a note).
13Halperin: "kinaidoi, even if they actually existed" (p. 48); Winkler: "Of course, it is
quite another question whether. . . there actually were any real-life kinaidoi. . .. [The
kinaidos was] the unreal, but dreaded, anti-type of masculinity . .. a scare-image standing
behind the more concrete charges" (p. 46); the "legislative intent" ofthe prescriptive texts
"contains a fair amount of bluff" (p. 70). Cf. Winkler, pp. 52-54, where he treats the
kinaidos as at least a real threat to the people in his texts, "not just a joke or a possibility
without reality for [them]" (p. 54).
14Halperin in his chapter on prostitution spends very little time on male prostitutes

528 Amy Richlin
Halperin at one point goes so far as to paraphrase Foucault, with appar?

ent approval, as saying "No moral value, either positive or negative, at-
taches to certain kinds of caresses, sexual postures, or modes of
copulation" (pp. 68-69), which could hardly be farther from the truth.
Even evidence the Foucaultians themselves present attests to the social
misery that must have awaited any adult passive male, and moral con-
demnations of anal and oral intercourse are two a penny. But while
Winkler and Halperin sometimes acknowledge invective against passive
sexuality, and indeed it forms one of the main sources of Winkler's
chapter on the kinaidos, it is treated largely as a form of discourse, and
the question of its relation to sexual behavior and the lives of any real
kinaidoi is left hanging.15
What is at stake here? The motive underlying Halperin's writing, and
in part underlying Winkler's, is an activist one: to break out ofthe con?
straints imposed on sexuality by our own culture by arguing that they
are not inevitable, but historical, and socially constructed. The result,
though, seems to be that the material existence of the kinaidos fades
from view; at the same time, insistence on a complete rejection of "ho?
mosexual55 nomenclature entails emphasizing the issue of penetration
while denying the issue of same-sex partners. Thus we lose sight ofthe
fact that some forms of male desire for males in Greece and Rome were
the object of extreme scorn, whatever they were called, and that any
male who felt such desire would be in a lot of trouble. I propose here
that it might be possible to historicize homosexuality without losing it
as a concept.
An activist motive has also informed the work of John Boswell, who
however uses an entirely different
approach, labeled "essentialist55 by his
Foucaultian opponents. His 1980 account argues that the Romans ac?
cepted homosexuality wholeheartedly, to the point of sanctioning ho-
themselves (they make a cameo appearance as "the invisible others" at the end ofthe chap?
ter [p. 104]), and he devotes almost no attention to invective against kinaidoi, either here or
in the rest of the book. Though Plato's Aristophanes is ma4e to testify for Foucault, the
Aristophanes who made so many jokes about passive homosexuals does not appear. Simi?
larly, Winkler's chapter on kinaidoi deals mostly with the way in which citizen men kept
each other in line by calling each other names; he does bring up a group of men who sound
like self-identified passive homosexuals (pp. 63-64), but only briefly.
15Halperinnotes that men were "liable to be suspected of pathic desires" (p. 90); but he
calls an accusation ofa desire to be prostituted "merely a term of abuse" (p. 186 n. 78).
Winkler touches on Aristophanes' invective (pp. 51-52) and notes that young men were
subject to name-calling (p. 62); in contrast, see JeffreyHenderson, TheMaculate Muse, 2d
ed. (New York, 1991): "Of all the types of homosexual humor in comedy by far the most
common is the abuse of pathics" (p. 209), with list of sources (pp. 209-13).

mosexual marriages; surprisingly, the experience of the passive male is

obscured here, too. A sample: "None of [Rome's] laws, strictures, or ta?
boos regulating love or sexuality was intended to penalize gay people or
their sexuality; and intolerance on this issue was rare to the point of in-
significance in its great urban centers. . . . Neither [gay people] nor their
contemporaries regarded their inclinations as harmful, bizarre, im?
moral, or threatening."16 Although Boswell recognizes the "strong prej-
udice" against passive behavior by adult males, he claims that "prejudice
of this sort declined considerably" in the early principate, and he more
or less sets aside passives in favor ofa sweeping picture of "homosexual?
ity" as normal.17 In fact the sources he cites to this end are referring to
pederasty, but by conflating pederasty and passive homosexuality into a
single "homosexuality" he proves his point: for example, the emperor
Domitian had &puer (that is, "was a homosexual," in Boswell's terms),
so he cannot have legislated against any form of homosexuality.18 Be?
cause Boswell himself does not make the Roman distinction between ac?
tive and passive, he makes of the category "homosexual" much too
blunt a blade.
Boswell's
optimistic interpretation of the evidence is partly valid;
almost everything he claims for "homosexuality" in Roman society
was true for pederasty (it is stretching it to maintain that what hap?
pened to slaves at their masters' hands constituted their sexuality, as
he does).19 And he presents a really admirable and useful display of
evidence. In a recent article, he draws a picture of Roman male sex?
uality much closer to what the evidence will support, largely in
reaction to Foucaultian models, and his overview demonstrates the
existence of orientation
categories in Greek and Roman societies.
He even notes in passing that passives' sexual dealings were with
other males. But the unhappy experience of the cinaedus is still not
a concern of his, and he maintains that "the issue. . . was behavior,
not gender preference" and says that slaves were not disgraced by
their "receptivity."20
It is true that "homosexuality" corresponds to no Latin word and is
16Boswell, Christianity, pp. 82, 87. The Foucaultians make similar elaims; cf. the state?
ments in David Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The
Construction of Erotic Experiencein Ancient Greece (Princeton, NJ, 1989), p. 9; Halperin,
pp. 68-69; Winkler, p. 43. Cf. Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiq?
uity (Oxford, 1988), p. 66.
17Boswell, Christianity, pp. 52-53, 74-80, 75.
18Ibid., p. 67.
19Ibid., p. 57.
20Boswell, "Concepts, Experience, and Sexuality," pp. 72-73, 77-81, quotation on
p. 73.

530 Amy Richlin
not a wholly adequate term to use of ancient Roman males, since adult
males normally penetrated both women and boys. But it is partly ade?
quate to describe the adult male who preferred to be penetrated. An ac-
curate analysis is that there was a concept of sexual deviance in Roman
culture, which was not homologous with the modern concept "homo?
sexuality55 but partook of some ofthe same homophobic overtones our
nineteenth-century coinage owns: sex between men, ofa kind outside
social norms, "unhealthy,55 "unnatural.55 My goal here is to flesh out
the material circumstances of such men, to imagine their lives. I aim to
show, first, that men identified as homosexuals really existed at Rome
and, second, that their existence was marked both by homophobia
within the culture and by social and civil restrictions. After outlining
the range of Roman sexualities, I will focus on some tenuous clues to
the existence of a passive homosexual subculture at Rome and on
the massive evidence that mainstream Roman culture was severely
homophobic, at least where passives were concerned; this will involve a
close reading of JuvenaPs second Satire as an example ofa very widely
attested phenomenon. The section on subculture winds up at a point
not that far from BoswelPs intended destination in 1980 and treats
this putative subculture in light of the rites de passage undergone by
Roman citizen boys. I will end with a look at the evidence that there
were legal restrictions on some male-male sexual activities, includ?
ing the enigmatic lex Scantinia. I argue that the law penalized the
free male who willingly let himself be penetrated. This can be under-
stood as part of a much larger legal construct whereby Romans exer?
cised moral scrutiny over one another, namely, the infamia imple-
mented by the censors and praetors. My conclusion is that a free
passive male lived with a social identity and a social burden much
like the one that Foucault defined for the modern term "homo?
sexual.55 Moreover, there are definite points of resemblance between
my model and Greek cultures as described by Winkler and Hal?
perin, and I would suggest that some of my conclusions may apply
to Greek cultures as well. Halperin5s essay on male prostitutes and
Winkler5s on kinaidoi might be regarded as starting points for a fu?
ture investigator.
Foucault and Halperin begin from nomenclature; let me emphasize
that, if there was no ancient word for "homosexual,55 there were plenty
of words for "a man who likes to be penetrated by another man.55
Winkler chose the Greek term kinaidos to talk about passive homosexu?
als; this word was Latinized as cinaedus. We should be aware that the
term, though it was a common word for a passive male, was not the only
or proper word and is roughly the equivalent of the English term
"queer55?just one of a large number of insulting terms used by non-

cinaedi.21 Here are some ofthe other names by which Romans called a
sexually penetrated male: pathieus, exoletus, concubinus, spintria, puer
("boy"), pullus ("chick"), pusio, delicatus, mollis ("soft"), tener
("dainty"), debilis ("weak"), ejfeminatus, discinctus ("loose-belted" [see
below]), morbosus ("sick"). (Note how difficult it is to come up with a
self-claiming name to translate cinaedus and its synonyms; "gay" is not
exact, "penetrated" is not self-defined, "passive" misleadingly connotes
inaction; this is not a phenomenon we have named well either. Of
course "woman" poses similar problems.)22 The verbpatior, which has
the range of meanings"suffer," "undergo," "experience," is used of
being penetrated?as in vim pati, literally "suffer force," that is, "be
raped." (The word "passive" is derived frompatior, as the wordpathicus
from the Greek cognatepathein.) Women are said to be "born to be pen?
etrated" (Seneca Ep. 95.21,pati natae); hence the phrase muliebriapati,
"to suffer womanish things," used of male passives. The noun stuprum,
often found in these contexts, is hard to translate into English; it can
mean "rape" but is also used to refer to any sexual act outside the cul?
tural canon, regardless of consent.
As for an abstract noun, the word impudicitia (occasionally
inpudicitia), which literally means "unchastity," is commonly used to
refer to a male's willingness to have another male penetrate him, as
impudieus is used as a synonym for cinaedus
(cf. Cicero Phil 3.12,
impuro, impudico, ejfeminato). Maud Gleason demonstrates that such a
willingness was conceived of by the physiognomists of the Roman pe?
riod as a trait to be diagnosed; in fact we do not have so far to seek for
what was an idea of great popular currency.23 The ordinary Roman defi?
nitions of sexual identity remained consistent over at least the 400-year
span (roughly from 200 b.c. to 200 a.d.) ofthe late Republic to the high
Empire.
An example: Suetonius (who wrote in the reign of Hadrian, 117-38
a.d.) includes in each of his biographies of the Caesars (which draw on
contemporary material and begin in the mid-first century b.c.) a section
21The term kinaidos appears in Winkler, pp. 45-70; and in Michel Foucault, The Care
ofthe Self vol. 3 ofThe History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1986), pp.
18-20. On the original meaning ofcinaedus as "dancer," see J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual
Vocabulary(Baltimore, MD, 1982), p. 194. On the use of Greek loan-words in the Roman
vocabulary for homosexuality, see Adams, pp. 123, 228-29; MacMullen, "Roman Atti?
tudes to Greek Love," p. 486; and especially the opposing arguments by Williams, chap. 2.
22On the elusiveness of "woman" as a term, see Denise Riley, "Am I That Name?":
Feminism and the Category ofccWomen" (Minneapolis, 1988).
23On physiognomy, see Maud Gleason, "The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and
Self-Fashioning in the Second Century ce," in Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin, eds.,
pp. 389-416.

532 Amy Richlin
on sexual identity.The first, that of Julius Caesar, sets up a strongly

marked distinction between Caesar's behavior as penetrated (in his al?
leged and much-lampooned relationship with King Nicomedes of
Bithynia) and as penetrator (as an adulterer): et impudicitiae et
adulteriorum flagrasse infamia, "he was notorious both for impudicitia
and for adulteries" (Jul. 52.3). Suetonius supports this with a remark of
the elder Curio, in a speech, that Caesar was "every woman's husband
and every man's wife." (It should be noted that Caesar's post in Bithynia
was his first, at the age of nineteen?just on the edge of too-old-to-be-a-
puer, just the age for teasing. Testing this edge was a great source of
Roman humor.) Youthful impudicitia and grown-up adultery are like?
wise opposed in a similar section in the biography of Augustus (Aug.
71.1).
As for Claudius, sums him up as libidinis in feminas
Suetonius
profusissimae, marum omnino expers, "of the most excessively abundant
lust toward women, but altogether uninterested in males" (Claud.
33.2). Nero is not only interested in males but plays both active and pas?
sive roles, in keeping with his extreme moral depravity (Ner. 28-29);
Galba prefers males (mares), and especiallypraeduros exoletosque, "hard-
bodied and overripe ones," that is, those who were really beyond boy-
hood and should not have been attractive to him (Gal. 22). In other
words, whereas the Caesars could hardly be said to fail into any boring
routine, each one has a definable sexual identity, a set of preferences, of
which Suetonius approves or disapproves, using value-laden language
that he expects his readers to understand. And it would really be fair to
say that Suetonius describes Claudius as a "heterosexual," Galba as a
"homosexual," Caesar and Augustus as having had "homosexual"
phases or episodes in their youth, and Nero as a no-holds-barred
omnisexual Sadeian libertine.
Roman Objects of Desire
These sexual norms were by no means limited to the Caesars, who were
in a better position to break rules than most people anyway, and they
can be attested for all classes of Roman society. And, as both Halperin
and Winkler argue for Athens, so the highly class-stratified nature of
Roman society is an essential component in the construction of Roman
sexuality?the two systems can hardly be understood independently.
Marriage was normative for free women, though divorce and remarriage
were frequent. We have little testimony to Roman women's own desire;
of what Roman women wrote, only a few love poems of Sulpicia and
some fragments survive. All kinds of lechery is attributed to women in
our male-authored sources, including an attraction to cinaedi, whose

preferences did not apparently preclude sex with women, though again
we have only invective as evidence for this. Of lesbianism at Rome we
know very little; the silence is eloquent. But the lack of evidence cannot
be construed to mean that Roman women did not feel desire or had no
existence as sexual subjects; we just do not know.24
Prostitution was legal, and any free Roman male could penetrate his
male or female slave or freed concubine, while slaves and freedmen were
themselves so disdained that their sexual passivity would be condoned,
encouraged, or even assumed (likewise, their assumed sexual penetrabil-
ity contributed to the disdain in which they were heldj. Legitimate male-
male liaisons must have been common, condoned where freeborn
penetrated Other, ignored between non-citizens; what did it look like
from the slave5s point of view? Aside from the masters5 love poetry, we
have only graffiti, and the masters5 stories: Trimalchio5s defensiveness
(Petronius Sat. 75.11, "It5s not disgusting, what the master orders55; cf.
63.3), stories of resistance (Valerius Maximus 6.1.9, cf. 6.1.6, Seneca
Controv. 1.2), ofthe murder ofa master and rival (Tacitus Ann. 14.42),
ofthe pathos of an old slave (Seneca Ep. 12.1-3). But public opinion
did object when any man penetrated a freeborn man, or when a freeborn
man was reputed to be the habitual passive partner of any male (regard-
less of status). That this was so can easily be seen from both fictional and
ostensibly true sources.
Extant Roman authors categorized sexual behavior between males by
defining two syndromes, one "normal,55 one "abnormal.5525 Other possi?
ble patterns of male-male behavior?reciprocal relationships, desire to
penetrate adult males?are discussed far less frequently and as anoma-
lies, though if there were cinaedi they must have had partners, presum?
ably not all prostitutes. The "normal55 kind?pederasty?involved an
adult male, who is usually described as interested in both boys and
women, and a boy, who is described as not yet ready for women. The
adult male penetrates the boy, as erotic epigrams make clear. It has
24On the Roman sex/class system, see in general Sandra R. Joshel, Work,Identity, and
Legal Status at Rome (Norman, OK, 1992), pp. 27-35; Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 25-
31, 65-70, 81-96; Veyne, pp. 30-32. On cinaedi with women, see Richlin, Garden of
Priapus, p. 139 and n. 47. On lesbians, see Hallett.
25The lengthy discussion by Foucault and his followers of whether anyone in antiquity
thought male-male relations were "unnatural" is something ofa red herring, since the con?
cept of naturalness takes a larger and more ominous form in our post-Christian culture
than it did in antiquity, where it was a matter for philosophers. Statements that gender re-
versal is unnatural are not hard to find in ancient sources; see, for example, Cicero Dom.
139 (contrafas, "against what is right or permissible by divine law"); Ovid M. 9.730-34
(lesbians); Seneca Ep. 122.7 (among many other things); Athenaeus Deip. 605d; and lists
in Dalla, pp. 30-32; MacMullen, "Roman Attitudes to Greek Love," p. 494.

534 Amy Richlin
sometimes been alleged that the Romans borrowed this practice from
the Greeks, and that some never really felt easy with it;26 against this can
be set a wealth of enthusiastic protestations of love for boys, in a wide
variety of media.27 The "abnormal" kind?"passive" behavior by an
adult male?consists essentially in a man carrying over behavior and
preferences appropriate to a boy into manhood; the specific behavior de-
plored is a preference for fellating or being anally penetrated by other
men.
Boys in this system would, then, have had to pass through a period of
transition, in their late teens or early twenties. A few texts attest to such
a phase, but they focus not on a switch from penetrated to penetrator
but on the need for a young bridegroom to give up penetrating boys and
develop an interest in women. In the 50s b.c, Catullus's poem 61 pre-
sents (in the form of a wedding song) extensive instructions to the
young couple and the young man's former male slave-concubine about
what their proper behavior should be now: the young man must turn
from his smooth-shaven former sex-objects (134-41; apparently he has
been penetrating them); the wife should let her husband do what he
wishes lest he go elsewhere (144-46); and the poor concubinus, deserted,
his long locks cut, is going to have to lose his disdain for slave women
(121-40)?presumably he must now switch from passive to penetrator.
The question of any previous passive stage for the young citizen male is
not raised here. Martial, in the late first century a.d., produces a version
both less redolent of ritual and more graphic (11.78):
Use women's embraces, use them, Victor,

and let your prick learn a job unknown to it.
The wedding-veil is being woven for your fiancee, already
the maiden is being readied,
soon the new bride will cut the hair of your boys.
She will let her eager husband bugger her once,
as long as she fears the first wounds of this strange weapon;
but her nursemaid and her mother will forbid this to happen
more often
and will say, "This girl is your wife, [she's] not your boy."
Alas, what perplexities, what labors you'll suffer,
if a cunt is a thing foreign to you!
26MacMullen, "Roman Attitudes to Greek Love"; Foucault, The Care of the Self,
pp. 187-232.
27Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 34-44, 82.

So hand over a novice to a madam/instructress in the Subura

[red-light district of Rome].
She5ll make [him] a man; a maiden does not teach well.28
Noteworthy here is the focus on names for sex roles: the girl is uxor, non
puer?puer here being decidedly the name of a role (one whose anus is
penetrated) opposed to that ofuxor (one whose vagina is penetrated).
The process of marriage is a process of genital sorting-out: the mentula
must learn the cunnus and deal with what has been ignotum, peregrina; it
is assumed that pedicare is the groom5s preference (cf. Martial 12.96)
and to the bride actually preferable to the pain of first vaginal inter?
course (cf. Pr. 3); the older women have to spell out the rules. A (ma?
ture) female prostitute is recommended as a more suitable teacher, and
one who can actually make the candidate a vir. Meanwhile, the bride, by
cutting the hair ofthe new husband5s former pueri, is ending their status
as sexually attractive to him; like Catullus5s concubinus, they too are pass?
ing into a new stage of their lives.29 But again the stage in which the
groom himself would have been a sex object is left out.
Roman class-consciousness equated sexual submission with loss of
honor, admission of inferiority, and lack of virility. Hence the famous
dictum ofthe orator Haterius, defending a freedman taunted for having
been the concubinus of his former master: passive homosexuality
(impudicitia) was wrong (a crimen) for the freeborn but unavoidable for
Utere femineis conplexibus, utere, Victor,

ignotumque sibi mentula discat opus.
flammea texuntur sponsae, iam virgo paratur,
tondebit pueros iam nova nupta tuos.
pedicare semel cupido dabit illa marito,
dum metuit teli vulnera prima novi:
saepius hoc fieri nutrix materque vetabunt
et dicent: "Uxor, non puer, ista tibi est."
heu quantos aestus, quantos patiere labores,
si fuerit cunnus res peregrina tibi!
ergo Suburanae tironem trade magistrae.
illa virum faciet; non bene virgo docet.
29The curling locks of beautiful boys are a feature of poems in their honor; Martial re-
fers to them as capillati (3.58.31), comati (12.97.4), and criniti (12.49.1), and Petronius
often refers to capillati as a particularly desirable type of boy slave (Sat. 27.1,29.3 [a paint?
ing of Trimalchio in his youth], 34.4, 63.3, 70.8). In describing Giton in a public notice,
Encolpius calls him crispus, mollis, formosus?"curly-haired, soft, beautiful" (Sat. 97.2).
Martial (12.96) reassures a wife jealous of her husband's boy-concubines?his love with
them is brevisetfugitiva?but advises her not to bother offering anal sex, since hers is infe-
rior; cf. Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 41-42.

536 Amy Richlin
the freed and slave (in Seneca Controv. 4.pr.l0).30 The sexual vulnerabil-
ity ofthe male slave made him less than a man; a slave would be called
puer all his life, and it seems likely that this term recalls the sexual use as
well as the age status ofa xc&Xpuer. Sometimes owners tried to prolong
the physical characteristics of boyhood in their slaves, although we hear
of this only from disapproving observers.31 In other words, to be zpuer
(sexually) was to be stigmatized. The wedding poems above make clear
the functional interchangeability ofpueri and women?both are types
of socket. There does seem to be a certain ambivalence toward women
and a preference for a male object, and then further anxiety about what
kind of male object; the solution is, a male object strongly differentiated
from oneself, so that one is clearly penetrating an Other. The god
Priapus, in the poems known as the Songs ofPriapus, separates his threats
of rape against thieves into three types, as in Pr. 13: "Boy, you'll be
buggered, I warn; girl, you'll be fucked; a third punishment awaits the
bearded thief." The "third punishment" was oral rape, irrumatio, a puni-
tive act separated conceptually in Roman culture from the sexual act of
fellatio. Elsewhere (Pr. 64) the god says that, though a certain mollis
man comes to steal "from love ofthe punishment," he will turn a blind
eye?that is, he will reject this man (contrast his enticements ofa boy in
Pr. 5).32 The penetration ofa male with adult characteristics is here a
30Seneca quotes the story as an example of Haterius's ineptitude as a speaker; he says

that the dictum was repeated and turned into a joke, so that impudici and obsceni were
called "officiosi"("dutiful") for some time afterward. See Richlin, Garden of Priapus,
pp. 258-59. The legal information conveyed by this dictum is too vague to be helpful:
Haterius may have been speaking in an oratorical exercise rather than in court, in which
case he would not have been bound to any legal accuracy;crimen can mean "legal grounds
for accusation" or just "cause for serious reproach." On the legal realities of forced sex for
slaves and freedmen, see Joshel, pp. 30-31, 33-34, with her bibliography. An opinion of
Callistratus (D. 38.1.38.pr., early third century a.d.) holds that the duties of freed slaves to
their masters cannot include those that would damage their personal dignity; but see
Thomas A. J. McGinn, ccNeservaprostituatur: Restrictive Covenants in the Sale of Slaves,"
Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte:RomanistischeAbteilung 107 (1990):
337-53, for discussion.
31Pliny mentions several substances used to check the signs of puberty in boys: hya-
cinth root (21.170), used by slave-dealers; ants5 eggs and the blood from the testicles of
castrated lambs, also used by slave-dealers (30.41); and a mixture of bat's blood (30.132).
Seneca inveighs against the cruelty of keeping slaves in a false state ofpuer-hood (Ep. 47.7);
this is a notable example of the dangerous ambiguity thereby produced, for the slave "is a
man in the bedroom, a boy at the dinner table"?that is, the master is in fact passive. Cf.
Ep. 122.7 (discussed by Winkler, p. 21), where Seneca attacks men who live contra
Naturam: Numquam vir erit, ut diu virum pati possit, "Will he never be a man, so that he
mzypati a man for a longer time?" Cf. Halperin, pp. 88-90.
32On the Priapea, see Parker;Richlin, Garden of Priapus, pp. 65-70,114-27. On puni-
tive irrumatio, see Richlin, "The Meaning of Irrumare"; Amy Richlin, "Approaches to the
Sources on Adultery at Rome," in Reflectionsof Women in Antiquity, ed. Helene P. Foley

sign of anger, not desire. The penetrated male occupies a polluted cate?
gory, in Mary Douglas's terms; thus the horror of an adult male, a self,
who allows penetration.33
And thus poets are careful to address pederastic poetry to boys
marked as slaves, such as Domitian's eunuch cupbearer Earinos, or as
prostitutes, such as the boy who teases Martial to get a better price
(11.58.1-4).34 Thus the story goes that the poet Valerius Valentinus
lost his court case when his opponent read out a poem in which Valerius
jokingly had claimed to have seduced a free boy (puerum praetextatum)
and a freeborn maiden (first century a.d., Valerius Maximus
8.1.absol.8). Thus Apuleius (in the second century a.d.) complains that
Lucilius (in the second century b.c.) had "prostituted" Gentius and
Macedo by writing about them under their own names (Lucilius 272
Marx).35
The standard that is set for boys of good family deliberately distances
them from these sexual norms. While moralists writing on young men
clearly expect and fear that such boys will be attracted into a relationship
with an older man or men, they hope that this will not happen and
breathe a sigh of relief when the boy is safely
married, as does the
younger Pliny (Ep. 7.24.3). Good-looking boys of a vulnerable age are
to be put in a well-chaperoned school (Pliny Ep. 3.3.4); schools were a
source of worry and schoolmasters not to be trusted?even the most fa-
(New York, 1981), 379-404; and, for modern comparative material, Halperin, pp. 38-
39; A. Nicholas Groth, Men WhoRape: The Psychologyofthe Offender (New York, 1979).
33MaryDouglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis ofthe ConceptsofPollution and Taboo
(London, 1966).
34Martial'spoems to the cupbearer Earinos are 9,11-13, 9.16-17, and 9.36. Martial's
"beautiful boy" poems are almost all addressed to boys with Greek names; their status is ei?
ther explicitly servile or left vague: 1.46, 3.65, 4.7, 4.42, 5.46, 5.83, 6.34, 7.29, 8.63,
9.56,9.103,10.42,11.6,11.8,11.26,12.71,12.75. The exceptions are a"Sextus" whom
the poet is wooing (2.55), and the remarkablepoem 8.46, which addresses a boy "Cestus"
who must be free?his marriage is anticipated?and describes him in chaste but erotic
terms. It may of course be the case that some ofthe Greek-name poems pose as addressing
ingenui under assumed names; cf. Tibullus's Marathus. If Catullus's "Juventius" is a real
name, he was breaking a lot of rules.
35Cf. also Valerius Maximus 9.12.8, in which he calls the deaths of two upper-class
males who died while having sex with boys perridicula; cf. Pliny HN 7.184, two males of
the equestrian class who died while having sex with the pantomimus Mysticus, "of out-
standing beauty." In neither case is the act itself problematic; contrast Valerius Maximus
9.1.8, where he expresses lengthy horror at the action ofa tribunes' agent who prostituted
two matronae and a nobilispuer Saturninus for the entertainment of state officials. Note his
comment on the prostituted bodies: probrosapatientiae corpora, "bodies disgraceful for
their openness to penetration."

538 Amy Richlin
mous professors, such as Remmius Palaemon (Suetonius Gramm. 23).36

Seneca remarks on the chastity ofa good-looking youth (Mare. 22.2):
"that most beautiful body of your son, kept safe by the highest custody
of chastity amid the eyes of the wanton [luxuriosae] city" (though cf.
24.3, where his beauty lures women). The family honor is at stake; when
Valerius Asiaticuswished to insult his prosecutor, who had charged him
with "softness of body," he is said to have shouted, "interroga, . . . Suilli,
filios tuos: virum esse me fatebuntur"?"Ask your sons, Suillius; they'll
testify that I'm a man" (Tacitus Ann. 11.2.2). Here again what defines
the vir is penetration; what disgraces the young male is being penetrated
by an adult male.
This accounts for what may be called the locus de aetate in rhetoric; it
seems to have been standard practice to undermine the opponent's
righteous stance by accusing him of having been someone'sj^r in his
youth.37 We see the interchange complete in two little political pam?
phlets, pseudo-Sallust Invective against Cicero (2; 5) and pseudo-Cicero
Invective against Sallust (1; 7; 13); pseudo-Cicero responds directly to
pseudo-Sallust (7, "As for what you insinuated against my youth [in
aetatem], I think I am as far from impudicitia, as you are frompudicitia").
It makes a good joke to see the master ofthe locus tarred with the brush
he himself wielded so adroitly, but we begin to wonder whether there is
any real behavior in question at all. Lest we doubt too much, it is useful
to bear in mind that not all such accusations are anonymous; the stories
about Julius Caesar and King Nicomedes were many and public, and
Suetonius provides a whole list of attributions (Jul. 49). He provides a
similar list for the stories that Octavian had in turn been Caesar's puer
(Aug. 68). Of Domitian, Suetonius says there were stories that he had
been "corrupted" by his successor Nerva (note the logic ofthe dynastic
daisy chain)?and, more circumstantially, that an ex-praetor named
Claudius Pollio used to keep and show around a letter he had received
from the young Domitian, offering him a night (Dom. 1.1). So it seems
36Cf. Quintilian Inst. 1.2.4, 2.2.1-4, and especially 2.2.14-15; Juvenal 10.289-311,
Suetonius Aug. 44.2. See Lilja, p. 43, for an example ofthe randy schoolmaster in the
fabula Atellana; in general, see Richlin, Garden of Priapus, pp. 223-24. MacMullen,
"Roman Attitudes to Greek Love," p. 482, takes Cicero's elliptical description of the
goings-on of the young Hortensius (son of the consul and orator) to indicate that the
young man had propositioned him; if so, this would provide a valuable record of a first-
person reaction set out in a letter to a friend (Att. 6.3.9; cf. 10.4.6). But it is hard to be sure
what Cicero means here.
37See Skinner, "Pretty Lesbius," on the use of such charges as metaphors for political
status and behavior; Richlin, Garden of Priapus, p. 98 and n. 30, pp. 101, 283; cf.
pp. 14-15 on the Philippics.The treatment ofthe theme in Cicero'sPw Caelio (6-15, 28)
deserves special mention; discussed in Lilja, pp. 95-96.

probable that, if there was a shadowy borderland in which any Roman

adult male could take potshots at the boyhood of any other, it shaded off
from a more brightly lit area of lived and public experience. The story of
Domitian5s letter would not work if such a letter were unthinkable. Yet
the light is not full. These are all accusations, not confessions, much less
routine or proud proclamations; we have no first-person statements
from a freeborn puer, much less from a slave.
Far rarer are real accusations of (continued) passive homosexuality in
an adult male. These are very hostile and tend to be set in the past and
far away?Cicero claiming that Clodius had "satisfied the lusts of the
Cilicians and the barbarians55 when already grown up (iam robustus,
Har. Resp. 42?he would have been about twenty-four at the time; the
talk of King Nicomedes and the nineteen-year-old Caesar serves as a
comparison). Others are brief or vague,38 with rare and staggering ex-
ceptions, such as Valerius Maximus5s story (3.5.4) of Hortensius
Corbio, grandson of the orator Hortensius and a contemporary of
Valerius: "Now Hortensius Corbio, grandson even of [that] Quintus
Hortensius who the highest rank of authority and eloquence,
achieved
led a life more abject and more obscene than that of all the whores; in
the end his tongue prostituted itself as much among the brothels to the
lust of all as his grandfather5s had exercised vigilance in the forum for
the welfare of the citizens.5539
The focus here is on oral, rather than anal, passivity (a Roman preoc?
cupation)40 and on prostitution, but Valerius certainly is objecting to
the man's letting himself be used?literally open to the public (an inter?
esting contrast between the fellator5s mouth and the orator5s). What is
surprising, and revealing, is that Valerius here publishes an extremely
damaging story about a man who would have been known to his audi?
ence and was no Caesar to spawn apocryphal tales about himself. It
seems likely that there is some truth in it. We note that Valerius5s story is
unlike the one Hortensius might have told.
Nero5s bivalence has been noted above; Suetonius similarly remarks
of Caligula (Calig. 36.1): "He spared neither his own nor others5
pudicitia [that is, he both allowed himself to be penetrated and pene?
trated others]. He is said to have enjoyed Marcus Lepidus, the panto-
38Vague accusations of passive homosexual activity pervade Cicero's treatment of

Gabinius in his speeches; cf. pseudo-Cicero in Sall. 9. In an anecdote retold by the younger
Seneca (De Ben. 4.31.3-4), Scaurus makes a joke on his own oral passivity.
39"IamQ. quidem Hortensii, qui. . . summum auctoritatis atque eloquentiae gradum
obtinuit, nepos Hortensius Corbio omnibus scortis abiectiorem et obscoeniorem vitam
exegit: ad ultimumque lingua eius tam libidini cunctorum inter lupanaria prostitit, quam
avi pro salute civium in foro excubuerat."
40Cf. Richlin, "The Meaning of Irruniare," and Garden ofPriapus.

540 Amy Richlin
mime dancer Mnester, and certain hostages by the interchange of mu?

tual sex-crime [commercio mutui
stupri]."41
The phrase commercio mutui stupri is one of the very few examples in
Latin of words describing reciprocal homosexual intercourse, and it is
decidedly pejorative (cf. Seneca Ep. 99.13, mutuo impudici, in a list of
sins). And how much ofa referent for the lives of ordinary people can
the lurid biographies of Caligula and Nero be? But of ordinary people
we usually have only passing hints: Licinius Mucianus, "of notorious
impudicitia," who annoyed his friend, the emperor Vespasian, but was
dismissed tolerantly by him with the words ego tamen vir sum, "I on the
other hand am a man" (Suetonius Vesp. 13); two junior officers in the
rising against Domitian who escaped punishment by proving that they
were impudici and "for this reason could have been of no account either
with the commander or the soldiers" (Suetonius Dom. 10.5); Fabius
Persicus and the consular Rebilus, "a man ofthe same infamia," from
whom Julius Graecinus refused to accept donations (Seneca De Ben.
2.21.5-6; cf. 4.30.2). A legal handbook blandly discusses the real case
of "a certain senator accustomed to wear women's evening clothes," in
the context not of his sexuality but of his possible disposal ofthe clothes
by will (cited in D. 34.2.33; cf. D. 34.2.23.2, where a man "cannot eas?
ily wear [women's clothes] without vituperatio"). We saw above how
Valerius Asiaticus taunted Suillius Rufus by claiming to have used his
sons sexually; one of these sons, Suillius Caesoninus, actually escaped
execution in the scandal over Messalina's orgy, according to Tacitus, be?
cause of his passive sexual behavior (Ann. 11.36.5): "He was protected
by his vices, because at that most foul gathering he had played a passive
part [passus muliebria]." Again, these are not first-person pronounce-
ments or neutral accounts; but when we ask, Were there really cinaedi),
stories like these may be the best we can do.
They tell us more than nothing. Sometimes being impudicus could
allow escape from punishment rather than cause it. A cross-dresser
could make a will. Men in government could have a reputation for
being passive and still do business. Army officers (plausibly) could be
passive homosexuals. Then again, they could also be "dismissed
tolerantly" and "of no account" (neque... ullius momenti); the beneficia
ofa passive homosexual were to be rejected. Thus we have an upside and
a downside: on the upside, real people, maybe even a subculture. On the
downside, dismissal, maybe worse.
41"Pudicitiae <neque suae> neque alienae pepercit. M. Lepidum, Mnesterem

pantomimum, quosdam obsides dilexisse fertur commercio mutui stupri."

Subculture and Homophobia: Juvenal 2
Though largely hostile, the extant sources give tantalizing hints that
Roman culture may have included a subculture that substituted norms
associated with passive homosexuality for the norms ofthe mainstream
culture. Dick Hebdige emphasizes the importance of affect?styles of
dress, body language, vocabulary?both in setting a modern subculture
apart and in reinforcing its cohesion as a group:
The tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be

found reflected in the surfaces of subculture?in the styles made
up of mundane objects which have a double meaning. On the one
hand, they warn the "straight55 world in advance of a sinister
presence?the presence of difference?and draw down upon
themselves vague suspicions. . . . On the other hand, for those who
erect them into icons, who use them as words or as curses, these
objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value.42
Such signs formed the language of insult in interactions between

Roman males; attacks on reputation refer to a world in which the attri-
butes of the female are substituted for the attributes of the male, as in
Cicero5s anecdote about a mid-first-century b.c. aristocrat (De Or.
2.277):
One time Quintus Opimius, of consular rank, who had had a bad
reputation as a youth, said to the party boy Egilius, who seemed
rather mollis though he wasn5t, "How about it, Egilia dear? When
are you going to visit me with your spindle and wool?55 "Heavens,
I don5t dare,55 he replied, "for my mother won5t let me visit women
of ill repute.5543
The possibility ofa male homosexual subculture at Rome should not be

set aside. We occasionally have (hostile) attestations of groups of real
people marked by their style of dress; Cicero so describes the followers
of Catiline (Cat. 2.22-24), "whom you see with combed hair, glossy, ei?
ther beardless or heavily bearded, with tunics down to their fingertips
42Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979), pp. 2-3.
43"Ut, cum Q. Opimius consularis, qui adulescentulus male audisset, festivo homini
Egilio, qui videretur mollior nec esset, dixisset, ?Quid tu, Egilia mea? quando ad me venis
cum tua colu et lana?' cNon pol,' inquit, ?audeo, nam me ad famosas vetuit mater
accedere.'" A contemporary jibe about this Opimius's bad reputation as a youth (et
formosushomofuitetfamosus) is preserved in the fragments ofthe satirist Lucilius, who says
he later overcame it (418-20 Marx). He became consul in 154 b.c.and served as an army of?
ficer (Polybius 33.10.6); see Georg Wissowa, ed., Paulys Real-Encyclop'ddie der Classischen
Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1939), vol. 18.1, cols. 678-79, s.v. "Opimius" 10.

542 Amy Richlin
and toes, wearing sails, not togas. . . . In these flocks all gamblers, all
adulterers, all impure men and unchaste men [impuri impudicique] are
tumbled about together.5544 Odd clothing of certain types was east up to
individual men in insinuations about their sexual proclivities?so for
Sulpicius Galus in the second century b.c. (Gellius 6.12), the orator
Hortensius in the first century b.c. (Gellius 1.5), and Maecenas under
Augustus (Seneca Ep. 114). The zdjective discinctus, "loose-belted,55 was
used as a synonym for "effeminate.5545 On the level ofthe stereotype, cer?
tain attributes and styles recur throughout the period as characterizing
the mollis man: lisping speech; putting the hand on the hip, or, more
commonly, scratching the head with one finger; use of makeup;
depilation; and wearing certain colors, especially light green and sky
blue.46 Quintilian, in the late first century a.d., discusses the rhetorical
use of such stereotypes (Lnst. 5.9.14): "Perhaps one might call the
plucked body, the broken walk, the female attire the signs [signa] of one
who is mollis and not a real man [parum viri]. . . as blood flows from
murder, so those things may seem to flow [fluere] from impudicitia."
Moreover, we have the surprising but repeated assertion that some men
who looked like shaggy, ascetic Stoic philosophers were really passive
homosexuals, not only in Roman sources but in contemporary Greek
sources.47 It seems at least possible that some of these characteristics
44Cf. Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 100, 222.

45Ibid., pp. 92-93. Persius 3.31, 4.22; Seneca Ep. 92.35, 114.4, 6; Elegiae in
Maecenatem (author unknown) 1.21-30, 57-72, 77-78; Suetonius Jul. 45.3. The crazy
clothes worn by Caligula (Suetonius Calig. 52) show the extreme. Maecenas seems to have
been a common target for such allegations (cf. also Seneca Ep. 19.9), although he is also a
prime example ofa mollis man notorious for heterosexual exploits. The idea ofdiscinctus
was that the unbelted tunic was allowed to hang down to the ankles.
46Lisping or fluting speech: Martial 10.65.10; Persius 1.17-18, 35; Phaedrus app. 8.2;
Quintilian 2.5.10-12; Juvenal 2.111. Hand on hips: Juvenal 6.0.24. Scratching the head
with one finger: Juvenal 9.133; an epigram of Calvus, in Karl Buechner, ed., Fragmenta
Poetarum Latinorum (Leipzig, 1982), p. 112; Seneca Ep. 52.12; Lucian Rhetoron
Didaskalos 11; and cf. Plutarch Pompey 48.7, quoted in the epigraph above. Makeup:
Petronius Sat. 23.5; Juvenal 2.93-95, 6.0.21-22. Colors:galbinus (light green), Martial
3.82.5, cf. 1.96.9 galbinos mores, Juvenal 2.97; caeruleus (sky blue), Juvenal 2.97.
Depilation: see below, n. 69. For catalogues of these characteristics, see: Gellius 6.12
(speech ofScipioAemilianus, second century b.c); Seneca Ep. 52.l2,QNat. 7.31.1-3, Vit.
Beat. 7.3; Lucian RhetoronDidaskalos 11-12, 15, 19, 23, 24. For outward appearance as
social sign, see Phaedrus app. 8.1-3; Seneca Vit. Beat. 13.3. For discussion of similar cata?
logues in the second century ad., see Gleason, pp. 390-411. For legal definitions and stric?
tures on men wearing women's clothing, see Dalla, pp. 18-23.
47Martial1.24, 1.96, 2.36, 6.56, 7.58,9.27, 9.47,12.42; cf. Lucian Symposion36. See
Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 138-39, 201-2, 285. Athenaeus (late second century a.d.)
paints an interestingly different picture (563d-f, 564f, 565d-f, 605d; cf. Halperin, pp.
88-90). Seneca, on the other hand, writing as a Stoic against Epicureanism, inveighs
against voluptas and associates it with the traits of the mollis man; see especially Vit. Beat.

were accurately reported and formed part ofa self-presentation used for
sexual signals and group cohesion.
JuvenaPs second Satire (early second century a.d.), which combines
many of the above features, most strongly suggests an organized
subculture. I look at this poem at length here for that reason, though
there is much other evidence and many other long texts that give insight
into other
aspects of male-male
relationships at Rome (the Satyricon,
Juvenal 9, and Strato5s Musa Puerilis leap to mind).48 Two preliminary
cautions: first, this culture accurately can only be described as passive
homosexual rather than "gay,55 since Juvenal 2 is devoted
strictly to ac?
counts of adult males who allow themselves to be penetrated by other
adult males; and second, when reading the Satire we must bear in mind
that it is a satire and compare it with Juvenal 6, on women, to which it
bears some strong structural resemblances. Central to both pieces is a
description of an orgy (a perversion ofthe rites ofthe women's goddess
Bona Dea), both being of the type in which a male narrator imagines
what "they55 do when there are no "men55 there. It is unlikely, then, both
prima facie and structurally that either description has any rigorous
grounding in fact, and both might be expected to bear the marks of
wishful thinking. On the other hand, no one would deny that Juvenal 6
had a real referent?women; why should the referent for Juvenal 2 be
less real? JuvenaPs caricatures of women do tell us some things about
real women; maybe his caricatures of cinaedi can be useful, too.
The poem falls into the following sections:
(1) Lines 1-35 expresses his disgust with men who

The narrator
pretend to be rigidly moral Stoic philosophers when they are really
cinaedi.
(2) Lines 36-63 The same theme is continued in a speech by a
woman, Laronia, who says that none of the debaucheries attrib-
uted to women by these moralists is as bad as what molles do
themselves.
7.3, 13.4; De Ben. 4.2, 4.13. On the hypersexuality of false Cynics, see Lucian Drapetai
(Runaways) 18-19.
48The following argurnent represents a modification of Boswell's in his Christianity; he
takes Juvenal 2 as evidence that Rome endorsed relationships between adult males (p. 82).
Cf., briefly, Verstraete, p. 234. Against Boswell's assertion (in Christianity, p. 75 [cf. p.
79]) that there is no hint in Juvenal 9 that it is scandalous for Virro to hire an active male
prostitute, I can only direct the reader's attention to the disgust for Virro in lines 38, 43-
47, 70-78, 86, and the long section on Virro's desire for secrecy at 92-123. On Juvenal 2,
see David Konstan, "Sexuality and Power in Juvenal's Second Satire," LiverpoolClassical
Monthly, vol. 17 (1992).

544 Amy Richlin
(3) Lines 64-81 The narrator derides an interlocutor, Creticus,

for dressing in a transparent toga, worse than what even a woman
convicted of adultery would wear.
(4) Lines 82-148 The narrator says that the next step for
Creticus is to degenerate into the society of men who dress like
women, celebrate women's religious rituals, marry husbands in
clandestine ceremonies, and even become gladiators.
(5) Lines 149-58 The narrator imagines the horror of the he?
roes of Roman history when the ghost of one of these men arrives
in Hades.
(6) Lines 159-70 The narrator suggests that Rome is spreading
this corruption even to its barbaric but manly conquered enemies.
The homophobia of this poem is undeniable; the narrator elaims that

the hypocrisy ofthe Stoic/passives is what bothers him, but obviously it
is only the last straw. What primarily bothers him is that these men are
penetrated by other men. To describe this as a satire "objurgating every-
thing from cosmetics to gluttony55 that might concern "effeminacy55 but
not homosexuality is a serious distortion.49 Nor is this poem the prod-
uct ofa culturethat practiced a sunny tolerance of all homosexuality.
But the poem does provide some hints ofa subculture. In the first sec?
tion, the narrator upbraids the hypocrite (9-10):
You castigate foul things, when you are the most

notorious ditch among the Socratic fags?
He seems at least to imply the cinaedi have some internal coherence.

This idea is underscored by the narratorial spokeswoman Laronia in the
second section (44-47):
First check back

and scrutinize the men, for they do more things [than
women]; but their number
defends them, and the phalanxes joined at the shield-boss.
There5s great concord among the soft [molles].
The narrator, resuming, groups Laronia5s interlocutors as Stoicidae

(65); these Stoics themselves have a recognized costume and affect,
which includes a shaggy body (11), taciturn speech (14), and a crew cut
(15).
From lines 84 to 149 the narrator maps the descent of Creticus, who
wears a transparent toga, into a group he says is worse (82-83) and to
which he gives definite characteristics. These men dress in drag (84-
49Boswell, Christianity, p. 67.

116): hairband(84-85), necklace (85), a golden hairnet (96); wear a

sky-blue check or a chartreuse velour (97); and hold a mirror, a prop al?
ways associated with women (99). Like the wild women ofSatire 6, only
more so, they pervert the rites of the women's goddess Bona Dea, this
time excluding women in a travesty of the normal exclusion of men
(86-92; cf. 6.314-45), drinking from a glass in the shape ofa phallus
(95), as the servant swears by the master's juno (98; the guardian spirit of
a Roman woman was her juno, as a man's was his genius). Otho, mock-
epic ancestor to the heir ofthe mirror, is called 2Lpathicus (99) and is de?
scribed performing his beauty regime during the battles ofthe civil war
(104-7), in unfavorable comparison to Semiramis and Cleopatra
(108-9).50
The next section describes a wedding among these men: the noble
"bride" gives a dowry to his musician husband, and all the normal steps
in a Roman wedding ceremony take place?papers signed, congratula-
tions, a big dinner, the bride reclines against the groom (117-20); the
bride, at other times a Salic priest wearing the sacred armor (125-26),
now wears traditional bridal costume (124). A second wedding is
mooted, and it is implied that such weddings take place in secrecy and
are not reported (136), nor are children a possible part ofthe new family
(137-42).
If this was a subculture, what would have been the specific Roman
meaning of wearing women's clothes? Ofthe deplored variations on the
toga and tunica) Why is the appearance ofthe toga so problematic?
In Roman terms, any deviance in the wearing ofthe toga would con-
stitute a severe affront to the state; the right to wear the toga was the spe?
cial prerogative ofthe citizen male. Foreigners and those banished were
forbidden the use of the toga, while female prostitutes and women
found guilty of adultery, oddly enough, had to wear the toga instead of
the woman's stola (cf. Juvenal 2.69-70). Furthermore, the assumption
ofthe toga marked the male's transition from puer to vir. Each year, at
the festival of Liber (March 17), freeborn boys who had reached puberty
marched with their families to the forum, having that morning offered
the mark of their boyhood, the gold bulla, to the family Lares and ex-
changed the boy's toga?the toga praetexta?for the man's toga, the
toga virilis or toga pura.51 The bulla and praetexta were the marks that
distinguished a freeborn boy from a slave boy as a potential sex object;
50In contexts like this, foreign queens are always being dragged in to set off unmanly
Roman ralers; cf., for example, Dio Cassius 62.6.2-5 (speech of Roudicca attacking
Nero).
51SeeCharles Daremberg and Edmonde Saglio, eds., Dictionnaire des antiquitesgrecques
etromaines (Paris, 1877-1919), 5:347-53, s.v. "toga."

546 Amy Richlin
so Plutarch explicitly hypothesizes in his speculations on why Roman

boys wear the bulla?it is a sign, zparasemon (PlutarchMor. 288a). That
toga virilis and toga pura were used interchangeably reminds us of the
sexual overtones
of impurus?definitely #?-manly.
In an extended portrayal of the beautiful boyhood of his client
Caelius (Cael. 6-15), Cicero includes the following details:
[9] As for whether the aetas of Marcus Caelius could give rise to
those slurs of yours: it was guarded first by his own chastity
\pudore\ then also by the diligence and discipline of his father. As
soon as [his father] gave him his toga virilis . . . he was immediately
handed over by his father to me; no one saw this Marcus Caelius in
that flower of his aetas unless with his father or me or when he was
being instructed in the most honorable arts in the most chaste
[castissima] home of Marcus Crassus. . .. [10] But I in this place
am defending that time of aetas which is itself unsteady in its own
will, and moreover is troubled by the lust [libidine] of others.
The assumption of the toga virilis is marked by the need for strict
chaperonage, and the time in the boy5s life is marked as vulnerable. Simi?
larly, in a speech from earlier in the Republic, Scipio Aemilianus pro-
fesses his horror at seeing free boys and girls being taught to dance in the
dancing school with the cinaedi, particularly zpuer bullatus about twelve
years old (quoted and discussed in Macrobius Sat. 3.14.4-8).52
This landmark in a boy5s life was probably also the time at which he
emerged from guardianship (tutela) and became legally capable of some
ofthe actions that marked a Roman citizen:
(testis) andbeing a witness
"making and taking55 under a Roman will (testamentum). The precise
time at which this happened was not established even among the Ro-
mans, and t;he jurists argued over whether it should take place at a cer?
tain age (they settled on fourteen) or according to the boy5s physical
development?that is, when he reached puberty (Ulpian Rules 11.28).
There is some evidence that a physical inspection of the boy5s genitalia
was required before he was pronounced of age.53 If there was a ceremony
52On dancing generally as a sign of impudicitia, see Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 92,
98, 101. Scipio says the boy is dancing quam saltationem impudicusservulushonestesaltare
nonposset, "a dance that even an unchaste little slave could not dance nicely." Impudicus,
literally "unchaste," connotes sexual penetration; honeste, translated "nicely," connotes
chastity, moral purity, a social status that protects the honestusone from sexual assault. On
the time of the assumption of the toga virilis as a point of vulnerability, cf. Cicero Phil.
2.44, on Antony: Sumpsistivirilem, quam statim muliebremtogam reddidisti (discussed in
Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 14-15); Petronius Satyricon 81.5, die qui tamquam togae
virilis stolam sumpsit.
53Rousselle, Porneia, p. 59.

involved, all trace ofit is lost. The most suggestive evidence comes from
late in the Empire: Justinian (Inst. 1.22.pr.) says that the ancients fixed
the age of puberty for males not only by years but by the development of
the body; it is now appropriate to the castitas of the age "that what
seemed to be immodest to the ancients in the case of females, that is, the
inspection of the condition of their bodies [inspeetionem habitudinis
corporis], should also be applied to males." And the Codex Justinianus
(5.60.3) speaks ofthe "indecent examination established for the pur?
pose of ascertaining the puberty of males" (indecorem observationem in
examinanda marum pubertate) and the "disgraceful examination of the
body" (indagatione corporis inhonesta). It is suggestive that the Latin
word for "testicle," testis, seems to be only a specialized use ofthe word
for "witness"; apparently mature testes were needed in order to become a
testis or make a testamentum. A later source attests to phallic worship
during the festival
of Liber (Augustine Civ. Dei 7.21). The boy's rite de
passage at the Liberalia
thus may have included anxiety about his genita?
lia as well as about his change of clothing; we might compare a more ex?
treme example, the public circumcision of boys at puberty in modern
Turkey.54
Though a boy put on the "man's toga" at around the age of fourteen,
it was not until age seventeen, according to the praetor's edict, that a
boy became capable of pleading for himself in court (D. 3.1.1.3). By age
eighteen the puer would be expected to begin to objectify women and
young boys and transform his perception of his own anal/genital area;
during the Empire, a second ceremony came to mark the young male's
definite transition to a stage in which he should no longer attract sexual
attention from males. This was the depositio barbae, the first shaving of
the beard, which took place when the boy was about twenty. The cere?
mony was something for the family to fuss over (see, for example,
Suetonius Nero 34.5), and satirists jeer at extravagant whisker celebra-
tions.55 The occasion could be bittersweet; the down on an adolescent's
cheeks is the object of much admiration in pederastic love poetry, and
this same poetry states emphatically that the transformation of this
down to bristles terminates the boy's attractiveness.56 However, in our
54AlanDundes, lerry W. Leach, and Bora Ozkok, "The Strategy of Turkish Boys' Ver-
bal Dueling Rhymes," Journal of American Folklore 83 (1970): 325-49.
55Sources in Daremberg and Saglio, eds., 1:669-70, s.v. "barba." Petronius's
Trimalchio has put his first whiskers in a golden box in a little shrine in his entrance hall
(Sat. 29.8, possibly a takeoffon Nero's similar action, at Suetonius Ner. 12.4); see Martin
Smith, ed., Petronii Arbitri Cena Trimalchionis (Oxford, 1975), pp. 60-61. Cf. Juvenal
3.186-89, and sources in John E. B. Mayor, ed., Thirteen Satires of Juvenal, with a Com?
mentary (London, 1877), 1:201-2.
56Richlin, Garden of Priapus, pp. 35-38, 44.

548 Amy Richlin
period the actual transition was not so abrupt; between the ages of
twenty and forty, men (still called iuvenes, "youths,55 and many of them
still legally subordinated to their fathers) wore a short beard or
muttonchop whiskers. Again, we might assume ambivalence about the
physical change that marked the new life-stage.
So although it was common enough for Roman men to abandon the
toga for more comfortable clothing, we might conjecture that the mark-
ing by mainstream culture of particular travesties of the toga, or of the
adoption of women's clothing, is reacting to a deliberate reference by a
subculture to the cultural (political/gender) meaning of the toga. We
might conjecture that a marking by mainstream culture of particular
mannerisms is reacting to a deliberate reference by a subculture to the
cultural meaning ofthe male body. We might conjecture that a marking
by mainstream of depilation
culture is reacting to a deliberate reference
by a subculture to the cultural meaning of boys5 hair.
Dick Hebdige, in his study of subculture, cites social gatherings as
well as clothing as sites of remaking cultural sign systems. The wedding
scene in Juvenal 2 is certainly not legitimate in any Roman sense; we
cannot claim that Roman culture sanctioned marriages between men.57
But if we can take it as real, a distortion of something of which Juvenal
has heard, we can consider how such a ceremony, like a travestied Bona
Dea ritual, might have formed an important function of bonding for an
outgroup. The scene imagined in Juvenal 2 tallies in its structure with
what we might expect of a passive homosexual subculture at Rome if we
could hear about it firsthand.
Thus far the upside: maybe the hostile sources half-reveal to us a
Roman subculture. On the downside, the sources are hostile indeed.
Texts from all periods and classes apply pejorative adjectives to cinaedi
and use cinaedus and its synonyms themselves as insults.58 This invective
can be extremely harsh, sometimes involving threats of rape.59 And, ob-
viously, the lists of characteristics of cinaedi as seen above are hardly
57I disagree here with Boswell, Christianity, p. 82; cf. Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp.
135-39, 258 n. 2.
58Insults: Lucilius 32, 1058 Marx, cf. Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, p. 169; Plautus As.
627, Poen. 1318 (opposed to vir); Catullus 16, 25, 29 (see comments by Marilyn B. Skin?
ner, "Ut Decuit Cinaediorem: Power, Gender, and Urbanity in Catullus 10," Helios 16
[1989]: 7-24); and very commonly. The noun cinaedi is joined with the adjectives improbi,
Catullus 57.1,10;obsceni, Martial 6.50.3; turpes,Juvenal 6.O.3. Cf. Seneca Vit. Beat. 13.3,
turpi patientiae; 13.4 turpia. Pliny says there was an island in the Ceramaic Bay called
"Cinaedopolis" because Alexander had left some probrosi there (HN 5.134); cf. HN
28.106, probrosae mollitiae. In Greek: Lucian Pseudologistes 17, kinaidon kai aporreta
poiounta kai paschonta.
59See above, pp. 536-37, on Priapus.

meant to be complimentary. The cinaedus is firmly fixed in his sexual

role; a representative and slightly ungrammatical graffito testifies to the
usage of the word among slaves (CIL 4.1825): "Cosmus Equitias's
[slave]is a big faggot and a cocksucker with his legs spread apart."60
Compare the aristocratic scientist Pliny, who in one list of remedies
mentions "pebbles called cinaedia, which are bound onto swellings in
the groin" (HN 29.129?so much for the medical sense of humor). Al?
though it is true that authors sometimes claim that a man's wife is in?
volved with a cinaedus and that cinaedi seem to be faulted for excessive
sexiness in general, the involvement of a cinaedus with a woman is usu?
ally set up as a surprise; overwhelmingly and explicitly, cinaedi are said,
with disgust, to be passive homosexuals.61
Finally, it is not at all unusual to see passive sexuality dubbed a "dis?
ease" or an "infirmity"; this
categorization the comes close to
nineteenth-century diagnosis of "homosexuality" that Foucault claimed
not to have existed in antiquity, and there are suggestions that people
thought it was something you caught, and not a desirable thing,
either.62 One idea was that indulgence in passive homosexuality made a
man not only ill but pale.63 Pliny cites several cures: the hairs of a
hyena's anus, burnt and mixed with oil and used as an ointment on men
who are "of disgraceful softness" (probrosae mollitiae) will make them
not onlypudici but straitlaced (HN 28.106); for similar reasons, it is a
60?CCosmusEquitiaes magnus cinaedus et fellator est suris apertis."

611disagree here with Boswell, Christianity, p. 76^ who says that inappropriate gender
behavior at Rome "almost never" has to do with sex-object choice or passive sexuality. But
cf. Gellius 6.12; Catullus 33.2-4; Petronius Sat. 23.2-4; Juvenal 2.10; Martial 6.37,9.63,
12.16, and especially 3.73. For sources on the cinaedus as adulterer or highly sexed hetero?
sexual, cf. Richlin, Garden of Priapus, pp. 91-93, 139; see also Lucian Eunuch 10.
62Cf. Catullus 57.6 (Caesar and Mamurra are cinaedi, pathici, and adulteri?and
morbosipariter);Pr. 46.2, a woman morbosioromnibuscinaedis; Seneca Ep. 83.20, under the
influence of alcohol, inpudicus... morbumproftteturac publicat; debilitas, debilis, Martial
2.86.5, 10.65.10. Pompeius Festus, describing the effects of drinking the waters ofthe
mythical spring Salmacis (which made men hermaphrodites), says that "a man who had
drunk from it, grew soft with the vice of inpudicitia (vitio inpudicitiae mollesceret)"(Paulus
ex Festo 439L). On ancient medical writers who discussed passive homosexuality as dis?
ease, see Gleason, especially p. 410, on Caelius Aurelianus; Halperin, pp. 22-24 (arguing
that Caelius Aurelianus has nothing against the mollis man's choice ofa same-sex partner);
Winkler, pp. 66-69. Halperin's opinion is representative ofthe arguments of these three
scholars, but in my opinion this special pleading strains the ancient evidence severely.
Rousselle, in Porneia, does not distinguish consistently between active and passive homo?
sexuality in her overview of the medical writers of the Empire.
63Cf. Persius 1.26; Seneca De Ira 3.26.4, Vit. Beat. 7.3 (pallidam aut fucatam et
medicamentispollinctam, "pale or painted and daubed like a corpse with cosmetics," bal-
ancing pallor and makeup as equal perversions).

550 Amy Richlin
good idea to keep some hyena genitals in honey around the house (HN
28.99).64
Furthermore, in invective, as in the graffito above, connections are
drawn between passive anal sex and oral sex?that is, a passive would
also be interested in fellating other men?and there is extensive testi?
mony in Latin invective to feelings of physical revulsion toward those
who performed oral sex: one would not wish to kiss such a person (the
standard Roman greeting) or share dishes with him.65 Seneca deliberates
as to whether it is right to take money from a male prostitute; he con?
cludes that it is all right, but only as a loan; he will not "condescend to
friendship, which joins equals [similes]" (De Ben. 2.21.1-2): "What is to
be done by a captive, to whom a man of prostituted body and infamis
with respect to his mouth promises the price of his ransom. Should I
allow myself to be saved by an impure man? Once saved, then what
courtesy would I owe him? Am I to live with an obscene man?"66 There
is a curious conflation here ofthe commonly held idea that the body of
someone the os impurum is tainted with the idea that his money
with
would be tainted.67 We might compare Seneca's comments on Natalis, a
man of impure mouth who also had a lot of money (Ep. 87.16): "What
then? Did the money make him impure, or did he stain the money? It
fails on men like that like a dollar down a sewer."
In Juvenal 2, the weight of vituperation is devastating (and, in read?
ing what follows, it must be borne in mind that Juvenal is representative
rather than excessive in his attitudes). The narrator begins by saying the
Stoic/passives make him want to flee to the limits ofthe earth (1-3), cer?
tainly a strong statement of distaste. In his focus on oxymoron and his
resulting disgust, he calls such men tristibus obscenis (9), "stern obscene
men."68 These words are followed by the reproach quoted above
(9-10); the strong implication is that one who is a notorious ditch?a
socket, a passive receptacle?among Socratic cinaedi (another oxy?
moron, with a sideswipe at the Academy), is in no position to castigate
64See Boswell, Christianity, pp. 138-43, on the iconography ofthe hyena in the Chris?
tian period; Physiologus38 (by an unknown author).
65Richlin, Garden of Priapus, pp. 26-29, 69, 82-83, 93-94, 99, 108-9, 128, 132,
150-51.
66"Quid faciendum sit captivo, cui redcmptionis prctium homo prostituti corporis et
infamis ore promittit. Patiar me ab impuro servari? Servatus deinde quam illi gratiam
referam? vivam cum obsceno?"
67Cf. also De Ben. 2.21.5-6, where Seneca describes how Julius Graecinus, "an exem?
plar of a great-spirited man," said he would reject a propinatio (a toast) from Fabius
Persicus. Of Fabius, Seneca later says (4.30.2): cuius osculum etiam impudici denotabant,
"even the impudici counted his kiss as an insult." As seen above, he notes that Julius
Graecinus actually did reject money from Fabius.
68See Richlin, Garden of Priapus, pp. 1-31, for Roman concepts of obscenity.

turpia, because he is himself turpis. Forms of the word turpis, "foul,55

recur throughout the poem: 71, minus est insania turpis, "insanity is less
foul55; 83, nemo repente fuit turpissimus, "no one [ever] became com?
pletely foul all at once55; 111-12, turpis. . . libertas, "foul freedom.55
Other value-laden terms appear as well: 18, miserabilis, "wretched,55
and furor ipse, "madness itself55; 19, peiiores, "worse55; 22, infamis,
"marked by official social stigma,55 and deterior, "worse55; 34, vitia ul-
tima, "supreme vices55 used as a substantive for people; 48, detestabile,
"detestable55 (perhaps a pun on "testicle-less55); cf. 76, quaero an deceant
multicia testem, "I wonder if gauzy garments are proper for a witness,55
with a hint ofthe same pun; 82, foedius, "more disgusting55; 110, nullus
verbispudor aut reverentia mensae, "no sense of shame in [their] words or
reverence for the table55; 122, horreres maioraque monstra putares,
"would you shudder and think it a greater monster55; 127, nefas tantum,
"such an unspeakable deed55; 143, monstrum, "monster/bad omen55;
159, illic heu miseri traducimur, "alas, we are brought wretched to this
point.55 The last word in the poem is mores; this is certainly moral con-
demnation of sexual practices.
Another suggestion that the poet dislikes both the hypocrisy and the
act it conceals is carried by the list at lines 23-35, the gist of which is "let
him who is without sin east the first stone55; let the straight laugh at the
lame, he says, the white at the black; we cannot put up with the Gracchi
complaining about sedition, Verres about thievery, Milo about murder,
Clodius about adultery, Catiline about Cethegus (another famous trai-
tor), the triumvirs about the dictator Sulla, or Domitian reviving the
Julian laws against adultery, since his niece Julia had aborted so many fe-
tuses that looked just like him. Each of these examples not only sets up
an act of hypocrisy but concerns a morally reprehensible crime, which is
notoriously committed by the very person who complains of it.
The poet leaves us in no doubt that passive homosexual behavior is
the source of his disgust. Lines 9-10, quoted above, are followed by this
(11-13):
All right, your legs are shaggy, and the hard bristles
on your arms betoken a rough spirit, but from your smooth
asshole the swollen figs are cut as the doctor laughs.
The shaven rear is a mark of the passive, and the "figs55 (anal warts or
piles) are a stock joke, a giveaway sign of pathic sex.69
69Shaven rear: Martial 6.56; depilation generally: Persius 4.39; Martial 10.65.8,
11.43.10, 14.205.1; Juvenal 8.114, 9.95; Lucian Demonax 50; "figs": Martial 1.65, 4.52,
6.49.8-11, 12.33.

552 Amy Richlin
The narrator goes on to argue (15-22) that an outright passive is bet?

ter than these men:
More
truthfully, then
and more honestly [acts] Peribomius; him I attribute
to the fates, who professes his disease [morbum] by his face
and walk.
These men's wretched
simplicity, their madness [furor] itself
lets them off; but worse [are they], who attack such things
with the words of Hercules, and having spoken of virtue [vir-tus,
literally "manhood"]
shake their ass. "Shall I fear you, Sextus, while you shimmy?"
says the infamis Varillus; "In what way am I worse than you?"
The poet is talking about two kinds of man: one does something openly,
while the other does the same thing secretly, meanwhile criticizing the
first one. What are they doing? The words clunem agitant, "they shake
their ass" and ceventem, "shimmy," suggest strongly that the unstated
act is passive homosexuality; ceveo means "shake the haunches
invitingly" and is used exclusively of men, as criso of women (cf. Martial
3.95.13, sedpedicaris, sedpulchre... ceves, "but you are buggered, but
you shake your butt beautifully").
In the second section, Laronia, attacking molles, denies that women
do what molles do (47-48); she specifies (49-50):
Tedia doesn't lick Cluvia, nor Flora Catulla;

Hispo goes under young men and grows pale with both diseases
[morbo... utroque].
What diseases are these? Pallor, as noted, conventionally is cited as a tell-
tale sign that someone has participated in oral sex, and the context
makes it clear that one "disease" is performing fellatio; Laronia says,
women do not do what men do?women do not lick other women (that
is, men lick other men). From Juvenal's use of morbus above (17), as well
as from subit here, it seems probable that the other "disease" is being
anally penetrated; note also Laronia's division of sexual practice into
same-sex pairs.
Laronia later irisinuates that a woman can benefit by "sleeping third
in a great bed"?by covering up for what a man does with his freedman
(58-60). What is she helping to hide? Pederasty was nothing to cover
Summing up his orgy scene, the narrator asks rhetorically why these
men do not go ahead and castrate themselves like the priests of Cybele
(115-16), cutxing otTtheirsupervacuam. . . carnem, "superfluous flesh."
And this immediately precedes the wedding scenes, in which the first

central character, Gracchus, does not merely marry his trumpet-player

but is his "bride55 (117; cf. 120); the unnamed second example is said to
"wed55 (nubit, 134), a verb most commonly used ofa woman getting
married. These men are playing a woman's role sexually as well as
socially.
Finally, at the end of the
poem a youth from warlike Armenia,
brought to Rome as a hostage, is said to have "indulged an ardent trib-
une55 (165); his accoutrements of manhood will be east away (169), and
he will take home with him praetextatos... mores, "the morals of those
who wear the praetexta" (170)?the toga ofthe young Roman citizen
male. This is a bitter comment on the topsy-turviness of a world in
which Rome has become more effete
the proverbiallythan
erfete and
alien east; what is implied is that Rome used to be, and should have kept
on being, active in relation to the passive empire. The Roman projection
of Rome as a male fucking the rest ofthe world is too large and depress-
ing a topic to go into here. This is not something Juvenal has made up;
he is drawing on a tradition that goes back at least to the time of Lucilius
(second century b.c.) and, I would argue, is probably intrinsic to Roman
cultural identity.
This shows up in the attitudes the poem manifests toward its object.
Least ominously, observers within the poem laugh at the Stoic/pathics:
the doctor laughs (13, ridente); the straight laughs at the lame (23,
derideat); Laronia smiles (38, subridens). Then there are voices of con-
tempt or disgust: the narrator5s impulse to flee (1-3); "Who would bear
it?55 he asks (24), and he answers, "Laronia did not bear55 (36). Even the
vitia ultima "have contempt55 for the false moralists (contemnunt, 35).
Then there are hostile suggestions or wishes: these men should castrate
themselves (115-16); it is a good thing the "brides55 cannot bear chil?
dren, as they wish to?steriles moriuntur, "they die sterile55 (140). Then
there are references to passive homosexuality as a "disease,55 as seen
above (15-22, 50), or as "madness55; and a graphic simile (78-81):
Contagion [contagio] gave this

ruin/defect/stain [labem]
and will give it to more, just as the whole flock in the fields
falls from the mange of one, and pigs [fall] from scurf,
and a grape derives a bruise from the sight of [another] grape.
Once well into his catalogue of their behaviors, the narrator begins
treating the passives as a monstrous symptom to be cured by institutions
of state and religion. "O proceres," he cries, "do we need a censor or a
haruspexV^ (121)?will the regular official purge ofthe citizen body be
enough, or will we need the taking of omens by a priest? The passives are
compared with monstrous births that mix human with animal (122-

554 Amy Richlin
23). The "bride" is not just any man, he is an aristocrat and a Salic priest
(125-26), who dances in the sacred armor at the rites of Mars; his exis?
tence is (implicitly) a sacrilege. The poet addresses Mars himself, "father
ofthe city" (126-32), using traditional titles, evoking the traditional
image of Romans as rustic, manly shepherds, repeating male kinship
terms (pater 126, nepotes 128, patri 131) as vir marries vir (129); this is
tongue-in-cheek, a joke, but a homophobic joke. That a Gracchus be?
comes a retiarius is an even greater monstrum (143).70 At last, the shades
ofthe Roman heroes?what do they feel when "a man like that" reaches
them in Hades? "They would wish to be ritually purified" (153-58).
Overall, the attitudes of the poem are strongly and specifically reminis-
cent of the homophobic rhetoric of today.
So a passive homosexual subculture would have been marked off not
only by Foucault's "category of forbidden acts," and not only by the
"bluff" of invective, but by loathing. And by law.
Illegalities: Infamia, Rape, Seduction, Submission
In the first parts of this essay I have tried to establish: first, that cinaedus
and its synonyms had real-life referents in Roman cultures; next, what
the circumstances were that defined their existence, both their possible
self-fashioning and the limits
placed on them by their society. In this last
section, I will consider a special set of limits, namely, the legal, civil, and
constitutional disabilities assigned to passive homosexual males.
A great deal of ink has been spilt over the question of whether homo?
sexuality was "illegal" in Roman culture, largely based on the enigmatic
attestations ofthe lex Scantinia.71 It is my contention that this famous
law is a red herring in the present context. Legislation was never the
main source of social coercion in the massive institution of Roman law,
which relied heavilyon custom, family self-supervision based on the
power of thepaterfamilias, and civil rather than criminal process. Rome
never had much in the way of police surveillance, and much of Roman
prosecution is well described as "self-help." The work of Winkler and
70Gladiators were infames, and the tainting of the upper classes by a descent into the
arena is a common lament in the literature ofthe first century ad.; but this passage seems to
imply something more. The sexuality ofthe retiarius is a famous vexed question; other key
loci are Juvenal 6.0.7-13, 8.199-210; Seneca QNat. 7.31.3. See the bibliography in
Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, p. 255 n. 64. On the moral and sexual connotations ofthe
arena in general see Carlin Barton, Sorrowsofthe Ancient Romans (Princeton, NJ, 1992).
71See,with his bibliography, Boswell, Christianity, pp. 63-71; and Lilja, pp. 112-21.
The present discussion will argue against most of these writers' conclusions. For a rea-
soned discussion of the possible origin, date, and function of the law, see Fantham, pp.
285-87.

Halperin has pertinently adduced anthropological studies of modern

Mediterranean cultures to illuminate the workings of shame and honor
in ancient Greek cultures; of course we would expect similar structures
to operate in Rome. And indeed this aspect of Roman life can be and has
been extensively documented. The lex Scantinia, whatever it was, takes
its place as part of a much larger and more comprehensive system.72
Lnfamia
They make the punishment fit the crime: they hang traitors and
turncoats from trees, while cowards and the unwarlike and those
who are infamis with respect to their body they drown in muddy
bogs, pressing a wicker framework on top of them. The distinction
in punishments has this meaning: that crimes should be made pub?
lic while they are being punished, but sins should be hidden.73
Thus Tacitus (Germ. 12.1-2), commenting on the ideal customs of

those noble savages, the ancient Germans. As usual in the Germania, we
see here a refraction of Roman attitudes (note the company that passive
homosexuality keeps here, and the important differentiation between
scelera, "crimes,55 zndflagitia, "sins55) through "other55 customs wistfully
projected onto the Germans. As will be seen, the Roman legal treatment
of homosexuality was less "hidden55 than what Tacitus attributes to the
Germans, though no less dramatic; and it had everything to do with the
description of people as infames corpore, which can be a technical legal
term.
The Roman legal attitude toward passive homosexuality falls under
the rubric of an important and extensive concept in Roman law:
infamia. I will base my outline here on the early but accessible discus?
sion ofinfamia by A.H.J. Greenidge, first published in 1894.74 Lnfamia
began historically as a condition related to the purview of the censors,
72Foran overview of Roman law, see John Crook, Law and Life ofRome (Ithaca, NY,
1967); on shame in Rome, see Ramsay MacMullen, Roman Social Relations: 50 b.c. to a.d.
284 (New Haven, CT, 1974), pp. 62-65; Bzrton, passim.
73"Distinctio poenarum ex delicto: proditores et transfugas arboribus suspendunt,
ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames caeno ac palude, iniecta insuper crate, mergunt.
diversitas supplicii illuc respicit, tamquam scelera ostendi oporteat dum puniuntur,
flagitia abscondi."
74A.H.J. Greenidge, Infamia: Its Place in Roman Public and Private Law (Oxford,
1894; rpt. Darmstadt, 1977). For technical discussion of infamia, see Max Kaser, "Infamia
und ignominia in den romischen Rechtsquellen," Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur
Rechtsgeschichte:RomanistischeAbteilung 73 (1956): 220-78. For consideration ofthe re?
lation between infamia and passive homosexuality, see: Dalla, pp. 51-55; Rousselle, "Per?
sonal Status," pp. 315-22. On the censors' role, see Andrew Walker, "Oratio Censoria in

556 Amy Richlin
the highest officials in Rome. A pair of censors was elected every five
years, and they had as their tasks the taking ofthe census and the making
of adjustments to the rolls of citizens, especially to the lists of senators
and equites, or "equestrians55 (originally cavalry, eventually men ofa cer?
tain wealth). Lnfamia, paradoxically, was the name both for a state in?
herent in a person that could cause him to be struck off a list, and for the
state he attained by being struck off. Causes for infamia included sexual
misconduct, along with many other sorts of moral lapses. The censors
literally made marks?notae?on actual lists of names.
The student of anthropology here has a chance to exercise imagina?
tion, in picturing the highly public scene at which this took place. In the
Republic, the censors transacted their business in the Forum, the heart
of Rome; like judges, they could hear the testimony of witnesses in any
given case and make comments; and the interest of such a drama was
augmented by the tremendous spectacle ofthe recognitio equitum, the re?
view ofthe equites. For each of these men (and Augustus, in his review, is
said to have seen five thousand of them) came forward to the censors5
tribunal leading his horse, to be examined physically and morally by the
censors.75 This regular show?the review of cavalry was conducted
every year under the Empire?constituted a public stage on which each
man5s honor as a Roman was recognized?or not.
This reputation was called in Latin existimatio, sometimes caput (lit?
erally, "head55); Greenidge calls it "civil honor.55 The censors5 mark and
the state which it produced (or which led to it) was called zprobrum, and
the state was called infamia or ignominia; those in this state were infames
or famosi. And the opposite of an infamis was an integra persona?a
"whole person.5576 This vocabulary should sound familiar, since it is
used repeatedly throughout the passages on sexuality cited in the first
parts of this essay. Moreover, the contrast between the infamis and the
integer is especially interesting in light ofthe sexual meaning ofinfamis.
The censors5 mark did not bring on any form of criminal punish?
ment, which, at Rome, was in any case an institution that meant widely
different things for different people at different times. (For free citizens,
punishments in the late Republic and early Empire consisted, de facto,
Republican Rome" (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1988), pp.
36-49. On the related infamia attached to actors and others, see Florence Dupont,
Uacteur-roi, ou le theatre dans la Rome antique (Paris, 1985), pp. 93-110; and especially
Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 1993), pp.
98-136. Winkler's discussion ofthe Athenian dokimasia is much in point here.
75Greenidge, pp. 93-99.
76Ibid., pp. 4-5, 114-15.

mainly in exile or fines; executions were carried out only for a few seri?
ous crimes, while prisons, floggings, and crucifixions awaited only
slaves, non-citizens, and, later, the lower classes?but this setup is really
not so alien after all.)77 The censors controlled two rights, the ius
suffragii (right to vote) and the ius honorum (right to hold office), and
the censors' decision affected specific classes of (male) citizens differen-
tially: a senator might be removed from the senate; an equestrian might
lose his horse, which removed him from the class of equestrians and its
rights and privileges; and an ordinary citizen might be excluded from his
tribe and "relegated to the aerarii," a mysterious plight that seems to
have involved loss of suffrage.78
In other words, a man who received an adverse judgment from the
censors would lose some civil rights and suffer a major public humilia-
tion. The tirade of Scipio Aemilianus against Sulpicius Galus, in which
he castigates Sulpicius's shaven body, makeup, clothing, and putative
cinaedic sexuality, is thought to have been a speech he gave as censor at
the recognitio equitum of 142 or 141 b.c.79 This is not so far from the ef?
fect Winkler outlines for the Athenian dokimasia, arguing that a man
who did not desire a public career would not concern himself about it.
But although the anecdotes we have suggest that a Roman's reaction to
the censors' nota would not have been suicide, the loss of position and
rights was real and significant.80 Like the Liberalia, the census as event
77On Roman criminal process and punishments, see Crook, pp. 268-78; on class divi?
sions, see Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford,
1970); J. M. Kelly, Roman Litigation (Oxford, 1966).
78Greenidge, pp. 10, 34-35,106; see further, Alan E. Astin, "RegimenMorum," Jour?
nal of Roman Studies 78 (1988): 14-34.
79Forthe speech and date, see Alan E. Astin, ScipioAemilianus (Oxford, 1967), p. 255;
for acerbae orationes of Cato as censor, Livy 39.42.6-7. For discussion of the censorial
process, see Walker, pp. 21-35, 37-40; also on the public display ofthe revised senate
lists, with comments.
80Winkler,pp. 54-64. Rousselle puts forward two cases described by the Severan histo?
rian Dio Cassius, which, she says, show men committing suicide over condemnation for
passive homosexuality ("Personal Status," pp. 318-19). I do not think the text supports
her argurnent: in the first case (probably C. Fufius Geminus, not "Germinius Rufus"; at
58.4.5-6, not 58.3), the man was accused of maiestas, insulted for malakia at his senate
hearing, and killed himself "like a man" when the quaestor came to have him executed; in
the second case (the Sulpicii Scribonii; at 62.17.2-4, not 64.17), the brothers' sexuality (if
that is what is indicated by the phrase tropontina ontes, "being ofa certain character")is not
the issue, nor is there a record of charges for homosexuality?the two men kill themselves
when they recognize the emperor's hostility toward them. The text says (62.17.4): "they
were charged with accusations such as that time brought with it" (presumably maiestas);
Nero would not see them; "and because of this they were slighted by all" (kai dia touth3
huph3hapantbn homoiosatimazomenoi), and so wanted to die. Compare the sequence of
charges and suicides, for example, at Tacitus Ann. 11.1-5.

558 Amy Richlin
focused on a stage of manhood, here on the paterfamilias; women and

sons in potestate did not appear.81 Moreover, since it took place only
once every five years, the census was a major public event?a sort of
moral Olympics.
The intermittent nature of the censors5
actions is important to keep
in mind as we turn to a much
bigger center of infamia action?the
praetor5s court. As explained below, praetorian infamia would have
been experienced on an ad hoc basis, although it entailed disabilities
much more vexing to the ordinary person than those the censors could
create.
The praetors were judicial magistrates who also organized legal pro?
cedure as it developed from year to year. Their office was next in impor?
tance to the consuls5, and their decisions were carefully preserved in a
body of procedural rules known as the praetor5s edict. The nature of this
edict, like that of all Roman law, was conservative; the edict accumu-
lated additions in the form of comment by learned jurists. For our pur?
poses, it is important to realize not only this general truth, but also that
the portion of the praetor5s edict on infamia in all likelihood reflects a
number ofthe norms used by the censors and took on the form in which
we have it by about 100 b.c.82 The Roman jurists seem to have seen a re?
lation between the censors5 infamia and the praetors5, as evidenced by
the vocabulary they use to comment on the edict, employing terms such
as nota and its cognates although the praetors in fact did not make
marks on anything.83
The praetor5s edict on infamia exists today as it was preserved in the
Digest of Roman law, sponsored by the emperor Justinian in 533 a.d. In
that text, it consists of comments and quotations by jurists such as
Ulpian and Paulus, who wrote under the Severan emperors in the early
200s a.d. And what they are quoting is the codification ofthe edict by the
jurist Salvius Julianus under Hadrian (110s a.d.?the "Julian redac-
tion55). Nevertheless, it is not likely that what we read in the Digest repre?
sents any kind of major innovation or late change in the law.84 This
statement is crucial because the praetor's edict includes eum qui corpore
suo muliebria passus est?"a man who has undergone womanish things
in his body55 (D. 3.1.1.6)'?under the rubric ofpersonas in turpitudine
notabiles (3.1.1.5). The class of "persons infamable on account of
81Greenidge, p. 63.
82Ibid., pp. 45, 58, 113, 133-34, 178.
83Ibid., pp. 115-16.
84Boswell's comments are misleading; he refers to Hadrianic comments on the
praetor's edict in the Digest as "legislation enacted under the later Empire" (Christianity,
p. 75 n. 61), and he lumps together the praetor's edict with Ulpian's commentaries and
Paulus's Sententiae (Christianity, pp. 122-23 and n. 8).

foulness" also includes those condemned on a capital charge and those

who fight beasts in the arena for money (3.1.1.6); compare the longer
list in 3.2, which includes actors, pimps, and people found guilty of vari?
ous crimes.
How can we be so sure that the praetor's edict as we have it represents
infamia in the Republic? We have an excellent check in the form ofthe
lex Julia municipalis, a law passed by Julius Caesar to regulate a sort of
quasi-censorian infamia in Roman towns and preserved in the form of
an inscription. And this law includes in its listing of those whose civil
rights are to be circumscribed queive corpore quaestum fecit fecerit?"a
man who has made or shall have made money off his body [that is, a
male prostitute]." The other categories in the lex Julia municipalis are
very close to those listed in the praetor's edict,85 and we might also com?
pare the clause in the tablet of Larinum that forbids those of equestrian
rank or above to be actors or gladiators. So our clause in the praetor's
edict about muliebria is perfectly plausible in a Republican context,
though it is indeed both broader as to social class and narrower as to sex?
uality than the clause in the lex Julia municipalis.*6
The general tendencies ofthe kinds of people considered infames tell
us something about the way Romans thought of passives: infames are
people who have done something bad, usually involving fraud; or who
habitually do something bad, usually involving the public use of bodies
(actors, pimps, gladiators). Such people are besmirched by their actions.
In this vein, the commentators on the edict opine that some rape victims
should be, as it were, de-smirched: si quis tamen vipraedonum vel hostium
stupratus est, non debet notari, ut et Pomponius ait (D. 3.1.1.6), "but
whatever man has been raped by the force of robbers or the enemy in
wartime, ought not to be noted, as Pomponius says also"; Pomponius
was a contemporary of Julianus. We will see below that there was always
85Greenidge, pp. 116, 121-38.

86But see Dalla, pp. 51-55, for a contrast between the lex Julia municipalis and the
praetor's edict; Kaser stresses the differences, though he considers the items on sexual
infamia as somewhat similar, p. 241. The lex Julia municipalis can be found in translation
in Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, eds., Roman Civilization: SourcebookI, The Repub?
lic (New York, 1966), pp. 416-20. The Larinum tablet can be found in translation in
Robert K. Sherk, ed., The Roman Empire: Augustus to Hadrian (Cambridge, 1988), pp.
61-63. For further discussion, see: MacMullen, "Roman Attitudes to Greek Love," p.
495; Rousselle, "Personal Status," pp. 317, 319. On male prostitution at Athens see
Halperin, pp. 88-112, especially pp. 96-97, 104. On Roman male prostitutes, see:
Werner A. Krenkel, tcPueri meritorii," Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Wilhelm-Pieck-
Universitat Rostock28 (1979): 179-89, and in general his article on "Prostitution" in Civi?
lization ofthe Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger (New York,
1988), pp. 1291-97; Thomas A. J. McGinn, "The Taxation of Roman Prostitutes," Helios
16 (1989): 86-87, and especially his Prostitution and Roman Society (forthcoming).

560 Amy Richlin
a tendency to blame the penetrated, and the law shows such a

consciousness.
The law treats passive homosexuals, along with others, as real people
whose activities are to be curtailed. How would praetorian infamia af?
fect them? First of all, in this part of the edict the passives and other
turpes are grouped (with women and blind people) in a class of people
who can plead in court only for themselves; we might note that boys
under age seventeen and deaf people are barred from pleading in court
at all (D. 3.1.1.3), while other kinds ofinfames are allowed to plead for
themselves and members of their families (3.1.1.11). This rule has to do
specifically withthe praetor5s realm?the court; he is regulating who
may appear before him (3.1.1.pr.). But this impaired right of "postulat-
ing55 was itself used as a mark of infamia, as the praetorian system swal-
lowed up the censorian one under the Empire.87 And we can gather
what the other effects of praetorian infamia were, both from the Digest
and from other sources. Men might be excluded from holding office, at
the discretion ofthe magistrates responsible for holding elections; they
might be removed from the album iudicum, the list of men eligible as jur-
ors; they might be barred from service in the army. Lnfames on trial
might be sentenced by the judge to severer punishments; infames might
be barred from bringing certain types of action in court. Likewise they
might be barred from giving testimony in certain kinds of court cases, at
the judge5s discretion; they might lose the right to witness a will
and even to make a will themselves?that is, they might become
intestabilis.88
Again it must be emphasized that all these effects of infamia would
have been ad hoc. Lnfames were not arrested or put in jail; the police did
not come to their houses. Their infamia did not affect them until they
were sued, or prosecuted, or wanted to make wills or give evidence, or
run for office, or join the army; and it was all up to the judge. (Does this
sound familiar?) In other words, they were faced with restrictions on
their civil rights. As with the censors5 infamia, we
may compare
Winkler5s comments on the dokimasia and note again that in societies in
which public reputation played such a large part, an officially bad repu?
tation was no joke.
As we will see, the office of the censor did not disappear under the
Empire, although it came increasingly to concern the senators and
equites rather than thepopulus.89 The emperors themselves held the office
and exercised its powers in ways relevant to the issue at hand. The bot-
87Greenidge, p. 144.
88Ibid., pp. 154-56, 162-63, 165, 168-69.
89Ibid., p. 102.

tom line here is that both the institutions of the censorship and the
praetorship could and did adjust people's civil rights on the basis of sex?
ual behavior.90 Other legal and quasi-legal evidence must be set in this
context.
Rape, Seduction, Stuprum
Pomponius, in his comments on the praetor's edict, makes allowance

for a crime not often mentioned in our newspapers: the rape of men by
men. It is significant that Roman legal and social attitudes toward this
action can be traced from the middle Republic, and in contexts involv?
ing infamia and the status ofthe passive homosexual. A fragment ofthe
elder Cato's speech De Re Floria (Cato orat. frag. 57 Jordan = Gellius
9.12.7) suggests that not only was rape ofa citizen male addressed by
the law in the second century b.c, but the definition ofthe crime, specifi?
cally the problem ofthe rape ofa man known to be passive, had been re-
fined through litigation: "But except for a man who openly peddled his
body or had hired himself out to a pimp, even if he had been disreputa-
ble [famosus] and of suspicious character, they ruled that it was not just
for rape to be committed against a free body."91 The passage singles out
three kinds of free men who might suffer impairment of civil status
based on their sexual behavior: those who hire themselves out to a pimp;
those who openly take money for sexual services; and those who are la?
beled as passive. It is only the last group whose rights are in question;
the label famosus indicates that they were subject to infamia, but here
they are treated favorably?relatively. Since the question is who may be
raped with impunity, presumably all three types of men are conceived of
as habitually passive, and on public record as being such. This sheds
some light on the clause queive corpore quaestum fecit in the lex Julia
municipalis and shows again the association between such a man and the
qui corpore muliebria passus est of the praetor's edict.
The passage must describe a clarification of an existing law against
rape, and it recalls current feminist arguments about the circumstances
in which rape ofa woman can be said to have taken place, which tend to
broaden the sphere ofthe law's protection to include women other than
those considered "respectable." The principle that Cato puts forward
90Infamia did affect women in some ways; see Greenidge, pp. 171-76. There is a hint
that lesbianism might have made women infames in two lines from Ovid Her. 15 (Sappho
to Phaon): 19, quas non sine crimine amavi; 201, infamem quae me fecistis amatae. See
Hallett, n. 12.
91"Sed nisi
qui palam corpore pecuniam quaereret aut se lenoni locavisset, etsi famosus
et suspiciosus fuisset, vim in corpus liberum non aecum censuere adferri."

562 Amy Richlin
here demonstrates legal differentiation on the grounds of sexual status

(abandonment of masculinity/rules/control jeopardizes legal protec?
tion) and some willingness to protect those of differentiated status (loss
of protection is limited to those who openly sell their bodies?"bad rep?
utation55 is not enough), and it is surprising to find it enunciated by
Cato.92 But he certainly draws the line at prostitutes.
That rape (stuprum cum vi) or even intercourse with a freeborn male
was subject to both public and private sanction is amply attested by
sources from both the Republic and the Empire.93 A rhetorical effusion
from around 100 b.c. links rape of a freeborn male with rape of a
materfamilias as traditionally being subject to capital punishment
(Herenn. 4.8.12). It is important to realize, though, that rhetorical effu-
sions are much more reliable guides to social norms?what strings an
orator thought he could tug?than to laws; this is true for Cicero5s
speeches, and even more so for the practice speeches that provide so
much of our evidence. Many of the "laws55 they cite were invented.94
Plautus provides an early sexual rule of thumb (Cure. 35-38): "No
one prohibits anyone from going down the public way; as long as you
do not make a path through posted land, as long as you hold off from
brides, single women, maidens, the youth and free boys, love whatever
you want.55 The safe objects of sexual desire according to this norm are
presumably prostitutes (publica . . . via)\ it is notable that those who are
off-limits, both males and females, are visualized as fenced-in farmland,
somebody's property. The fence bars the sexual adventurer from women
marriageable or married and from the young men and boys who are not
one5s own slaves. At the same time the fence makes it clear who is desir?
able. Adult males as objects are left out of the Plautine picture.
At least by the time of Marcianus (early third century a.d), rape (per
vim stuprum) of "boy, woman, or anyone55 was punished under the lex
92Iam indebted to Marilyn Skinner for discussion of this passage. Cato seems to take a
more hostile approach in a fragment ofa speech Against Q. Thermus(Cato orat. frag. 8 Jor?
dan = Paulus ex Festo 208L), although it is hard to tell whether he is talking disparagingly
about penetrated or penetrator there.
93On stuprum in the Republic, see Fantham, especially on the criminal process, pp.
272-73, 277, 285-87. For a brief overview and discussion ofthe term stuprum and its
range of meanings, see Jane F. Gardner, Women in Roman Law and Society(Bloomington,
IN, 1986), pp. 117-25; on the rape laws in the rhetorical scholae, with Greek and Roman
comparative material, see S. F. Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republicand Early
Empire (Berkeley, 1949), pp. 89-91; on Greek law, see Susan Guettel Cole, "Greek Sanc-
tions against Sexual Assault," Classical Philology79 (1984): 97-113; David Cohen, "Sexu?
ality, Violence, and the Athenian Law oiHubris" Greeceand Rome 38 (1991): 171-88.
Both stuprum and hubris were much broader in their scope than our term "rape";Fantham
and Cohen both deal with the implications for Greek and Roman notions of consent.
94Sce Bonner, pp. 84-132.

Julia de vipublica (D. 48.6.3.4); this law, probably dating from the dic-
tatorship of Julius Caesar, could entail the execution of the offender
(D. 48.6.5.2), a very rare penalty in Roman law.95 Modestinus,
Marcianus's contemporary, distinguishes stuprum from adultery as a
crime committed "against an unmarried woman [vidua], maiden, or boy
[puerY (D. 48.5.35[34]); his remarks are included under the lex Julia de
adulteriis coercendis, an Augustan law that seems to have aimed at
stuprum as well as at adultery (D. 48.5.6.1).
Finally, the early third-century jurist Paulus (D. 47.11.1.2) specifi?
cally describes the compass ofthe crime of seduction (also stuprum) and
the penalties that go along with it by that time:
A man who shall have led a boy into stuprum after abducting him
or bribing his chaperon, or shall have accosted a woman or girl or
done anything for the sake of impudicitia, or offered a gift, or fixed
a price in order to have his way: if he has carried out the crime, he is
punished capitally; if he has not carried it out, he is deported to an
island; the bribed chaperons are visited with the supreme
punishment.96
Such seduction or removal

of chaperons could also be prosecuted in a
civil suit as iniuria
(Ulpian at D. 47.10.9.4, even for freedmen and
slaves; Paulus, 47.10.10; Ulpian, 47.10.15.15-23). Even the act of ac-
costing or following a boy or a woman might affect the victim's reputa?
tion because ofthe implication that there might be a reason to think the
accoster would succeed, and of course such an affront also affected any
adult male responsible for the boy or the woman. The concern to pro?
tect against a sort of pimping by those who normally guarded chastity
has a notable parallel in the provisions of the Augustan lex Julia de
adulteriis coercendis for prosecuting complaisant husbands for
lenocinium, but here the blame rests first on the corrupter.
Talking about what tone counsel should take in speaking in various
kinds of cases, Quintilian cites "shameful ones, like stuprum, especially
of males, or osprofanatum"?oral rape??as among the most difficult. If
the victim himself speaks, he is to groan, cry, and curse his life; his law-
yer should do likewise, "because this kind of injury is more shameful to
95Bonner gives reasons why the stipulation ofa death penalty goes back to the original
law (p. 90).
96"Qui puero stuprum abducto ab eo vel corrupto comite persuaserit aut mulierem
puellamve interpellaverit quidve impudicitiae gratia fecerit, donum praebuerit pretiumve,
quo is persuadeat, dederit: perfecto flagitio punitur capite, inperfecto in insulam
deportatur: corrupti comites summo supplicio adficiuntur." On "capital punishment" and
the "supreme punishment," see Crook, pp. 272-73; the difference lies between a (de jure)
death penalty and an "unusually painful" death penalty.

564 Amy Richlin
speak of for victims (passis) than perpetrators (ausis)" (11.1.84). There

is ample evidence that the stuprator of free persons was considered a
wicked villain, and the stupratus a shamed victim, in the stories of the
rhetorical scholae, which are fascinated with the line between consent
and resistance?a line blurred by the term stuprum itself. Valerius
Maximus, in his collection of the edifying anecdotes of which the Ro-
mans were so fond (early first century a.d.), includes a section "On Chas?
tity55 (6.1), for which the story of Lucretia (6.1.1) is the model; the point
of her story, of course, is that after the wicked tyrant rapes her she kills
herself so as not to set a bad example. Six ofthe twelve stories that fol?
low involve penetrated males; their honor or shame is often the point:
the silence of young Marcellus (6.1.7; cf. Plutarch Marc. 2.3-4); the
whipping of a young citizen sold into debt bondage (6.1.9; cf. Livy
8.28); two soldiers accosted by officers (6.1.11, 12; both officers wind
up dead).97
The elder Seneca, in his collection of rhetorical exercises from the
early principate, includes the case of a "good-looking youth55
(adulescens) who was gang-raped by ten other adulescentes while he was
out in public dressed in women's clothes on a bet (Controv. 5.6). The
case posits that he has successfully prosecuted the others for rape. The
"law55 at issue is given as impudicus contione prohibeatur, "an unchaste
man shall be barred from speaking at an official public meeting55; a mag-
istrate has forbidden the youth to speak, and the youth is prosecuting
him for iniuria. Again, while this imaginary case cannot give us exact
legal information, it can tell us much about social assumptions. The
gang rape is conceivable, or as much so as the other circumstances in the
Controversiae (pirates in chains, and tyrants telling sons to behead their
fathers, as Petronius complained). The point at issue is, what makes an
impudicus) The magistrate5s argument is, if it looks like an impudicus and
quacks like an impudicus, then it is an impudicus.
The speeches from which Seneca quotes constitute a remarkable as-
semblage of homophobic and blame-the-victim sentiments, for exam?
ple, sic imitatus est puellam ut raptorem inveniret, "he imitated a girl so
well that he found himself a rapist55?a thought-provoking definition of
both impudicus unApuella. The act of rape is aligned with the act of com-
posing a carmen famosum, a slanderous lampoon?note the significance
offamosus, here "tending to create infamia.55 Attacks are made on the
youth5s aetas, and a specific contrast is drawn between his attempt to
speak at a contio after what he has undergone and what the speaker
97On Valerius's material, see Fantham, pp. 273-81. On the restriction of homosexual
relations in the army, see Dalla, pp. 55-61; Gray-Fow, pp. 454, 456; Fantham, pp.
280-81.

claims was the modesty in arranging the toga of young men beginning
their careers in the forum "in our fathers' time"; compare the signifi?
cance ofthe toga discussed above. The issue of whether he may speak is
probably related to the limits on postulating in the praetor's edict, al?
though here the "law" is exaggerated. The point is that undergoing
some acts, willing or unwilling, can damage the ability to speak in pub?
lic that defines the Roman man.98
Quintilian, listing examples of arguments that frankly admit to one
awful deed in order to mitigate a worse one, includes a hypothetical case
of rape leading to the victim's suicide (Inst. 4.2.69-71). He imagines a
lawyer arguing:
He raped a freeborn [male] and the raped [male] hanged himself;

nevertheless the rapist will not for this reason be punished capitally
as the cause of death, but he will pay the ten thousand, which has
been set as the penalty for a rapist. . . . Do you want me to say you
were driven by wine, you made a mistake, you were deceived by
darkness? All that may be true; but you raped a freeborn male, so
pay the ten thousand.99
Quintilian gives the example ofthe rape ofthe ingenuus along with one
of temple robbery, one ofthe rape ofa virgin, and one ofa conspiracy of
three sons to kill their father. These are, in Roman terms, among the
worst things one could do?all more or less sacrilegious. Yet Quintilian
just throws in the suicide ofthe shamed ingenuus; it allows him to en?
gage in a little semicomic fancy footwork. This dead body is a kind of
prop*
For here again, as in the cases of Lucretia and Verginia (Valerius
Maximus 6.1.2), the element of blaming the victim escalates into killing
the victim. One father whose young daughter has been deflowered by
her paedagogus kills not only the slave but the girl, "lest he celebrate a
foul wedding" (6.1.3). (Of course these stories are exemplary, not ordi?
nary.) Another of Valerius's stories involves one Publius Atilius
Philiscus, who killed his daughter "because she had been a partner in
staining herself in the crime of stuprum" (6.1.6). Note how vague the
wording leaves her volition. Valerius finds this all the more worthy of
98Cf. Winkler, pp. 54-64, on the relationship between dokimasia and public speaking
in Athens; Bonner, p. 105, on the Greek and Roman sources for the "law" in Controv. 5.6.
"This passage has traditionally been taken as evidence for the penalty under the lex
Scantinia; there is no reason to think this is so, or that Quintilian is talking about a real law.
See Bonner, p. 91; Lilja, p. 114 (who, however, takes the Quintilian passage to be
veridical).

566 Amy Richlin
comment in that the father, a freedman, "had been forced by his master
in his boyhood to prostitute himself. . . . How holy then we ought to
judge chastity was in our state, in which we see that even the salesmen of
lust turned out to be such severe punishers of it !55Today the process of
Philiscus5s cooptation seems more striking. A similar logic underlies the
definition of inpudicatus given in a later encyclopedia (Paulus ex Festo
96L): stupratus, inpudicus factus?"[masc] having been seduced, having
been made unchaste.55 As a Victorian would say, "ruined.55
Submission
Thus far, rape and seduction; but there is also a group of sources that in-
dicate that a voluntary act of passive homosexuality by a free man of any
age was in itself liable to be punished. Another of Valerius5s chastity sto?
ries suggests that well into the Republic fathers (or a family council)
judged the mores of the filiusfamilias much as they judged women in
potestate or in manu (6.1.5): Q. vero Fabius Maximus Servilianus ...
exegit afiliopoenas dubiae castitatis ("Indeed, Quintus Fabius Maximus
Servilianus exacted from his son the penalty of dubious chastity55?that
is, he had him killed). The story notes that Fabius was or had been a cen-
sor. The power of a family council over women is much better attested,
usually in cases of adultery, where fathers also had the right to kill a
daughter in flagrante delicto. Another source tells us that this Fabius?
probably Eburnus, not Servilianus?had, in his youth, the nickname
Pullus Lovis, "}upiter5s Chick55?supposedly because his buttock had
been struck by lightning.100 Valerius follows up the story of Fabius and
his son with the one about Philiscus and his daughter, and the similarity
he points out in the two stories shows how fine was the line between
stuprum with and without consent; likewise, the behavior of the two fa?
thers, so separated by social class, manifests a similar pattern.
So a paterfamilias might directly punish passive homosexuality in a
son; the system of infamia might use an imputation of passive homosex?
uality to limit the civil rights of an adult citizen male. Finally, a set of
rules attributed to the jurist Paulus treats rape ofa male and consenting
100SeeT. Robert S. Broughton, The Magistrates ofthe Roman Republic, 3 vols. (New
York, 1951), 1:550 n. 3; he attaches the incident to Servilianus's son, Fabius Maximus
Eburnus, censor 108 b.c, and his son, on the basis of pseudo-Quintilian Decl. Mai. 3.17;
cf. Orosius 5.16.8. These sources add the details that a family council was held and that the
son was relegated to the family farm; and they say explicitly that the father had his son
killed. For further discussion, see Fantham, pp. 278-79. On Eburnus's nickname, cf.
Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 288-89; Wissowa, ed., vol. 12, cols. 1796-98, s.v.
"Fabius" 111. For paternalistic surveiilance of sons, cf. the story of Cicero and the young
Hortensius, above, n. 36.

passive homosexuality as separate crimes and accords the two crimes

different penalties (Sent. 2.26.12-13): "A man who shall have raped a
free male against his will is punished capitally. A man who of his own
free will suffers stuprum or impure outrage is fined ofthe half part of his
goods; neither is he permitted to make testamentary disposition ofthe
remaining part."101 Other than infamia, and the considerable social bur?
dens sketched above, this passage in Paulus records the heaviest certain
penalty for passive homosexuality before the Christian emperors. But
the problem here lies precisely in the date of this set of rules. The
Sententiae of Paulus have come down to us in a compilation originally
made about a hundred years after him, in the early fourth century a.d.,
and further patched together from quotations from various sources.
These rules are likely to reflect what Paulus wrote but may incorporate
the sharpening of criminal penalties common during the later period. It
is probably safe to assume that Paulus said something on this topic and
quite possible that he drew the distinction between active and passive,
compatible as it is with the tenor of Roman social attitudes. The punish?
ment for passive stuprum, too, is in keeping with the practice ofthe mid-
principate, recalling the testamentary disabilities of passives under
praetorian infamia; it also resembles the penalty for adulterium given by
Paulus (Sent. 2.26.14) but is milder (partial forfeit, no exile). The pen?
alty for forcing a free male into stuprum is much more severe than the
penalty for a (free) male allowing stuprum to be done to himself, and it is
consistent with the penalties for rape discussed above. We might cau-
tiously suggest a model in which the law gradually broadened its focus
from the prostitutes ofthe lex Julia municipalis to the muliebria passi of
the codified praetor's edict and this rule, developed a special penalty out
of those already available for infamia, and (as here) came to treat
impudicitia as a form of stuprum. But we sorely miss an ancient account
of accusations and sentencing of real people under this system.102
Whereas common law punishes all homosexual activity indis-
criminately and regardless of consent (as most recently affirmed in the
101
"Qui masculum liberum invitum stupraverit, capite punitur. Qui voluntate sua
stuprum flagitiumque impurum patitur, dimidia parte bonorum suorum multatur, nec
testamentum ei ex maiore parte facere licet."
102Fora barely possible instance of such a charge, see n. 106 below. The text of Sent.
2.26.13-14 may be found in J. Baviera, A. C. Ferrini, and J. Furlani, eds., Fontes
IurisprudentiaeRomanae Antelustiniani, 3 vols. (Florence, 1940), vol. 2; for discussion of
the reliability of various sections, see Ernst Levy, Pauli Sententiae (Ithaca, NY, 1945; rpt.
South Hackensack, NJ, 1969), pp. vii-x. Boswell {Christianity, pp. 122-23) takes too
skeptical a view of the validity of Paulus's text as law. I am indebted to Thomas A. J.
McGinn for discussion of this problem.

568 Amy Richlin
U.S. Supreme Court case ofBowersv. Hardwick)^103 the Romans pena-

lized passive behavior (willingness to be penetrated) but not active be?
havior (willingness to penetrate) as such. A male citizen who penetrated
an appropriate partner?his wife, any of his own slaves, an actor or
dancer, a prostitute (male or female)?was perfectly within the bounds
of the law. Such a penetration was not stuprum, nor was consent an
issue. And all these other people had the right to be penetrated, though
not to refuse. What was stuprum was the penetration ofa freeborn male,
whether with or without his consent; these "consenting adults55 would
be partners in stuprum, and either or both might pay the price. The case
of Fabius Eburnus5s son shows the risk for the one penetrated; a last case
from Valerius shows how serious the results could be for the penetrator
(6.1.10):
Gaius Pescennius, tresvir capitalis, loaded Cornelius with chains,

even though he was a veteran who had earned his honorable dis?
charge most nobly, and who had because of his courage been
granted the honor of beingprimus pilus four times by his generals?
because he had paid a freeborn youth for stuprum [stupri commercium
habuisset]. Cornelius called the tribunes, but when he denied noth?
ing about the stuprum, but said he was ready to swear in court that
the young man had been prostituting himself openly and publicly,
the tribunes were still unwilling to intervene. And so Cornelius was
forced to die in prison. The tribunes ofthe plebs did not think that
our republic ought to make deals [pacisci] with brave men, so that by
their daring abroad they might buy their delicacies at home.
In Valerius5s rhetorical world, a soldier like Cornelius is expected to live

up to the highest moral standards, and he was making things worse by
attempting to bargain over the terms ofthe case (paciscor);pactio itself in
such a case was grounds for infamia.104 It is interesting that he was put
in custody, if not arrested, by one of Rome5s closest equivalents to a po-
liceman; the tresviri capitales were in charge of prisons, lower-class
crimes, and keeping the peace in the city at night.105 Meanwhile, what of
103SeeLonnie E. Griffith, Jr., "Sodomy," in American furisprudence, 2d ed. (Rochester,

NY, 1987), vol. 70A, pp. 1035-97: on consent, p. 1051; on Bowersv. Hardwick, p. 1044;
list of definitions, p. 1041; note especially the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice defi?
nition, "any unnatural copulation with another person ofthe same sex," p. 1056. Groth,
pp. 122-23, also shows that rape ofa male today includes any kind of forced sexual con?
tact, either active or passive, although it is more common for the one who forces to be the
one to penetrate.
104Greenidge, pp. 25n., 142.
105Crook, pp. 69, 168. For the criminal process in this case, see the discussion in
Fantham, p. 285.

the ingenuus involved? Of this young man we know very little.106 In this
case, no one seems to care whether he is impudicus or not, as if a freeborn
youth could not be in the legal category of "prostitute"?contrast the
case of Hortensius Corbio.
The Lex Scantinia
In this context, now, we can assess what is known of the lex Scantinia.
The law is attested seven times in extant Latin texts; it has traditionally
been assumed that it illegalized sexual relations between males, and
more recently it has been argued that it did no such thing.107 A technical
discussion ofthe sources would be out of place here; instead, I will make
a few points.
First of all, it should be amply clear by now that a law against pas?
sive homosexual acts involving free males would not be implau-
sible in Roman culture; nor could it have been very effective, but
this was no impediment to the passing of laws against adultery or
ostentation.
Second, such a law would have been superimposed on the penalties
already connected with passive homosexuality by the praetor's edict and
the censors' mark. There is unfortunately no attestation that links it
with the penalty mentioned in Paulus.
Third, the testimonia to the law leave us in no doubt as to its content.
This point rests on the mention of the law in Juvenal 2; we return to
Laronia's speech (36-40, 43-44):
Laronia did not bear a certain stern one of these

shouting so often,
"Where now, lex Julia, do you sleep?"
And so, smiling: "Fortunate times, which put you
in charge of morals. Let Rome now have chastity:
a third Cato has fallen from the skies. . . .
106Onthe Cornelius story, see also Lilja, p. 108; but her speculation that Cornelius had
been the passive partner is contradicted by the Latin text ("quod cum ingenuo
adolescentulo stupri commercium habuisset"; "adolescens ille palam atque aperte corpore
quaestum factitasset"; "domesticas delicias"). On the other hand, it seems possible that the
culprit in the next story, the military tribune M. Laetorius Mergus, had been soliciting his
cornicularius to penetrate him, since he was universaeplebis sententia crimine impudicitiae
damnatus, and impudicitia is not used elsewhere of active rape; but ancient accounts con?
flict. Cf. Fantham, p. 280.
107Seediscussions in Boswell, Christianity, pp. 65-68; Lilja, pp. 112-21. As I do here,
Gray-Fow argues that the law illegalized passive homosexuality as well as pederasty (p.
450).

570 Amy Richlin
But if laws and rights are dragged in, we ought to cite

the Scantinian before all.55108
In other words, the hypocritical passives who are the target of Juvenal 2
have been calling on the Julian law against adultery, in order to castigate
women for promiscuity; the figure of Laronia responds by suggesting
that these men are in no position to east the first stone, and later she
goes on to describe them at some length as molles. If men such as these
are conspicuously able to be prosecuted under the lex Scantinia, then
the law, at least in part, must be against passive homosexual behavior by
free men. That, as was demonstrated at great length above, is what
Juvenal 2 is about.
Another ofthe testimonia to the law is equally plain; Ausonius (Epig.
92) attributes fear ofthe lex Scantinia to a man he c&lh&semivir, literally
a "half-man55 or eunuch; this man also dislikes the lex Julia against adul?
tery, because he needs his wife to get pregnant. If Ausonius, a late
fourth-century rhetorician, is less credible as a witness, Juvenal is
enough; and all the other testimonia are compatible with such a recon?
struction. Only Prudentius, also in the fourth century a.d., implies that
the law opposed pederasty (Perist. 10.203-04).
Fourth, the four pre-Christian testimonia all speak of the law in the
context of the censorship. Two letters from Caelius to Cicero (Fam.
8.12, 8.14) depict the law as a sort of joke used in political game-playing
under the censorship of Appius Claudius in 50 b.c. Suetonius mentions
the law in a list of textbook censorian actions by Domitian (Dom. 8.3):
quosdam ex utroque ordine lege Scantinia condemnavit, "he condemned
certain men from either order [that is, senators and equites] under the lex
Scantinia.55 And JuvenaPs Laronia brings up the law while sneering at
the hypocritical passives as self-appointed censors: moribus opponunt,
tertius Cato (the first Cato was the great censor; and cf. 2.121, where the
narrator calls for a censor). Saara Lilja points out that all three ofthe
Christian testimonia describe the law as fearsome (Ausonius,
Prudentius, and Tertullian Monogamy 12.3); this might accord with a
connection to the regimen morum.109 In any case, an association with the
108 Non tulit ex illis torvum Laronia quendam

clamantem totiens "ubi nunc, lex Iulia, dormis?"
atque ita subridens: "Felicia tempora, quae te
moribus opponunt. habeat iam Roma pudorem:
tertius e caelo cecidit Cato. . . .
quod si vexantur leges ac iura, citari
ante omnis debet Scantinia."
109Lilja,p. 120.

censorship would locate the law as a version of what was also stated in
the praetor's edict.
Fifth, the lex Scantinia, each time it is mentioned after the reign of
Augustus, is cited in tandem with the lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis,
usually as if the two laws were somehow equivalent.110 The lex Julia
made adultery a crime and regulated when the killing of a woman and
her lover in flagrante delicto was allowed; perhaps the lex Scantinia also
represented a sort of crackdown. I would also argue that both laws are
perceived as regulating choice of sexual partner: a married woman can?
not have sex with a man other than her husband; an adult male cannot
have sex with another adult male.
The Half-Empty Glass
A comparison between this article and the Foucaultian analyses comes

down to a difference in emphasis. What is the gain from a model that
says there was no "homosexuality" in antiquity? Such a model allows us
to stress the difference between ancient societies and our own, to ex?
plore what they did have in their own terms. This move, however, when
it comes up against Greek and Roman invective against male-male love,
emphasizes its political use, its quality of "bluff"; homophobia tends to
disappear along with homosexuals. And this model makes it very hard to
talk about real cinaedi. What, on the other hand, is the gain from a
model that uses "homosexuality" as a category for analyzing ancient so?
cieties? An analysis from the perspective of gay history, such as the one
here, which stresses continuity rather than difference, would emphasize
what ancient invective has in common with homophobia and would
focus on real cinaedi, both on their oppression and on their possible
subculture. Such an approach could also look at difference, as, for exam?
ple, in defining the implications ofthe Roman concept ofstuprum for
the ability of adults to consent.
A review of the literature in the field shows a dialogic process, in
which statements at one extreme produce opposing statements; proba?
bly all could be modified. Jasper Griffin writes in opposition to the New
Critical approach that denies any reality to the homoerotic expressions
in Roman texts. Ramsay MacMullen argues that the mainstream of
Roman culture deplored all forms of homosexuality, to counter John
Boswell's thesis that Rome condoned homosexuality. David Cohen,
among others, on the Greek side and I on the Roman side respond to the
Foucaultian attempt to define ancient sexuality as completely separate
from modern. Perhaps the most important conclusion to take away
110On the Suetonius passage, cf. Greenidge, p. 175.

572 Amy Richlin
from all these studies is what comes

out in the surveys of ancient mate?
rial: these cultures were not
monolithic. A statement such as "Rome
countenanced homosexuality55 is reductionist with regard to Rome as
well as to homosexuality. What MacMullen demonstrates is that there
were some Romans who had trouble with the idea of homosexual
relationships?usually with passive homosexuality in adults, but some?
times even with pederasty?and that there were plenty of others who
did not. Likewise, David Cohen5s analyses of Greek law on pederasty
and hubris can be set against the texts used by the Foucaultians: we need
not be surprised to see that law and anecdote and literature give us not
only differing but conflicting views of reality.
So: were there homosexuals in ancient Rome?
Yes?and no. Marilyn
Skinner suggested to me that a better title for this article would be "Not
Before Queers55; the current title is provocative rather than exact. Did
Romans ever deplore male-male love as such? Certainly; the epigraphs
to this article are not unique. Real cinaedi are elusive; does this mean
there were none? Or, to return to the theoretical point with which I
began, does this testify instead to the completeness of their removal
from subjectivity in Roman culture?the incompatibility ofthe state of
being penetrated with the act of writing? Even after all the legal and his?
torical material surveyed here, we are still left with enigmas. What about
the famosus young man, Quintus Opimius, who we know went on to be?
come a respected army commander and consul? Lnfamis and its cog-
nates are clearly not always legal technical terms; attacks on character
are not coextensive with criminal charges. Then what about Fabius
Eburnus, "Jupiter5s Chick,55 who went on to become censor and had his
own son killed for "dubious chastity55? This joking matter could be
deadly. Recent work by John Clarke examines Roman art that shows
pederastic intercourse pari passu with intercourse between two men
who certainly look like adults; both depictions are equally romantic and
noble in treatment, and such depictions show up on pottery vessels as
well as on silver.111 Perhaps the ambiguities that cloak love between
Roman men are only the inevitable result ofa strong double standard.
The size, and perhaps the shape, of the gap in our knowledge can be
assessed by comparison with anthropological work on societies in which
people of ambiguous gender identity have a recognized place and can
speak for themselves. To cite a notable example, when we look at Walter
111John R.
Clarke, "The Warren Cup and the Contexts for Representations of Male-to-
Male Lovemaking in Augustan and Early Julio-Claudian Art," Art Bulletin (forthcoming,
1993). See also John R. Clarke, "The Decor ofthe House of Jupiter and Ganymede at
Ostia Antica: Private Residence Turned Gay Hotel?" in Roman Art: The Private Sphere,ed.
Elaine Gazda (Ann Arbor, Ml, 1991), pp. 89-104.

Williams's study ofthe Native American berdache, we see how much of

the cinaedus is lost to us. Recently Sandra Joshel has revived the voice of
Roman freed slaves out of their tombstone inscriptions; here is another
silent group awaiting their historian.112
112SeeWalter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh (Boston, 1986); Joshel, especially
pp. 3-15.


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Not before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love

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the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against

Leave the rest for sexy girls

It is A commonplace of women's history that the act of writing

[Journalofthe Historyof Sexuality1993, vol. 3, no. 4]

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the family, religion?is replicated by the structure of representation, so

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phases in the new Foucaultian accounts of ancient sexuality, which deal

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chapter to Athenian male prostitution; Winkler devotes a chapter to the

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better replaced by "both-and." Both Winkler and Halperin insist that

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Halperin at one point goes so far as to paraphrase Foucault, with appar?

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mosexual marriages; surprisingly, the experience of the passive male is

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on sexual identity.The first, that of Julius Caesar, sets up a strongly

Roman Objects of Desire

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Use women's embraces, use them, Victor,

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So hand over a novice to a madam/instructress in the Subura

Utere femineis conplexibus, utere, Victor,

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30Seneca quotes the story as an example of Haterius's ineptitude as a speaker; he says

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mous professors, such as Remmius Palaemon (Suetonius Gramm. 23).36

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probable that, if there was a shadowy borderland in which any Roman

38Vague accusations of passive homosexual activity pervade Cicero's treatment of

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mime dancer Mnester, and certain hostages by the interchange of mu?

41"Pudicitiae <neque suae> neque alienae pepercit. M. Lepidum, Mnesterem

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Subculture and Homophobia: Juvenal 2

The tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be

Such signs formed the language of insult in interactions between

The possibility ofa male homosexual subculture at Rome should not be

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44Cf. Richlin, Garden ofPriapus, pp. 100, 222.

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(1) Lines 1-35 expresses his disgust with men who

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(3) Lines 64-81 The narrator derides an interlocutor, Creticus,

The homophobia of this poem is undeniable; the narrator elaims that

You castigate foul things, when you are the most

He seems at least to imply the cinaedi have some internal coherence.

First check back

The narrator, resuming, groups Laronia5s interlocutors as Stoicidae

49Boswell, Christianity, p. 67.

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116): hairband(84-85), necklace (85), a golden hairnet (96); wear a

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so Plutarch explicitly hypothesizes in his speculations on why Roman

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