Sexuality, Gender, Body History

GENDER, SEXUALITY, BODY HISTORY – ANCIENT HISTORY HONOURS HISTORIOGRAPHY SEMINAR May 20, 2009, 6-8 p.m. [1] INTRODUCTION [2a] In his review of the first X-Files film “Fight the Future”, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Byrnes said this: “. . .the greatest echo of the whole X Files concept, the idea of a driven and resourceful man doing battle with the supernatural. . .goes back 2,500 years to the story of Odysseus. Agent Scully isn’t obviously the Penelope type - the faithful wife, waiting 20 years for his return, despite her 50 suitors - but she doesn’t look at other men either. . .” [b] and, even more telling in this context, “. . .in the movie, Gillian Anderson wears Olive Oyl-type high heels, but they’re not really to make her taller. It’s important in the erotic framing of the film that she is shorter - so she is always looking up at him, the classic submissive erotic pose of much Western art and cinema. . . She may be the practical one, the woman of science, but he (Fox Mulder) is the doer and the dreamer, and thus closer to the gods, whose capricious ways he is pledged to fight.” (SMH, Thursday, 23/7/98) The relationship between the poetry of an 8th century B.C.E. epic and the screenplay of a late 20th century feature film may at first glance appear oblique and tenuous, but the underlying attitudes strike a resonant chord and cry out for critical reappraisal. If the image of a woman can be seen to be bound by a symbolic order - a social and linguistic discourse which creates for her a place as the bearer, not the maker, of meaning - then exploring the historical contexts which help to create or question such an image is as worthwhile a project now as ever. Dare I say it - the truth is out there. [3a] Consider a less contemporary, but equally pertinent, example of this phenomenon: the myth of Teiresias. T was asked by the gods who found more pleasure in the physical act of sexual intercourse - men or women? The prophet replied that of the 10 units of pleasure involved, the man got 1 and the woman 9. What qualifications did T hold which singled him out in the eyes of the divine as someone to be trusted in the consideration of such a matter? The 3rd century B.C.E Greek poet and scholar, Callimachus of Cyrene (who flourished under the reigns of the Alexandrian kings Ptolemy II and III), tells us in an extant dramatic hymn (On The Bath of Pallas) that T had been blinded by Athena because he had seen the goddess naked. But, in an earlier recounting of the tale, the son of the nymph Chariclo was transformed into a woman while he was travelling in the Arcadian region of southern Greece - for the obscure felony of violating two snakes as they copulated. After observing the same snakes copulating again, he became a man. His status as now-man, once-woman, clearly held him in good stead. For his pains, however, Hera, consort to Zeus, blinded T (ostensibly on the grounds that he had given away “woman’s” great secret). Luckily enough for the blind Theban, the king of the Olympian pantheon, as was so often the case in the narratives of Greek mythological discourse, counterposed his wife’s action, giving T the power of prophecy or inspiration. [It should be noted in this context that sexual potency in Greek mythopoeic thought is closely linked with extra-perceptive power.] The blind seer of legend was born, in the shadow of a goddess’s outrage for all women and at the behest of a god’s understanding. As with Chris Carter’s storyboard for the X-Files, there are a few points of intersection between this reconstruction of a still more ancient myth and the premises of this course: [3b] (1) the mention of T and his colourful ‘history’ in Callimachus’s Hymn (no.5, to be precise) is the product of a man’s imagination. [c] Even more significant, the Alexandrian poet-scholar draws for his inspiration on the work of a 5th century B.C.E. genealogist, Pherecydes of Athens, who treated the legend of Teiresias in one of his copious mythical Histories (FGrH 3 F 92). [d] But it is possible to trace the origins of the legendary seer - whose ghost was consulted by Odysseus (Od. 10.490-5, 11.90-9) - to the work of an 8th century B.C.E. contemporary of Homer, [e] Hesiod, in a work about famous prophets (the now lost poem in three books, Melampodia). The detail is significant, and the implication clear. The myth of T is the story of a man who is able to tell other men about the sexuality of women, and it’s a story written by men for other men. At no point in the accretion of mythical layers to the story is there even the slightest suggestion of a female presence voicing the mandated claims about sexual enjoyment. [4] [The curious story of the double change of sex experienced by Teiresias, with the cause of it, is told also by ps.-Apollodoros, in a study of Greek heroic mythology which presents an uncritical summary of the traditional Greek mythoi (1st or 2nd cent. C. E.), Bibliotheke 3.5.7; Phlegon (of Tralles, a freedman of Hadrian, author of a work covering all the Olympiads, from the first to that of C.E. 140), Mirabilia 4; Antoninus Liberalis (a mythographer, probably of Antonine times, who published a collection, based on Hellenistic sources like Nicander, of Metamorphoses), Transform. 17; Ovid, Metamorph. 3.316ff; Hyginus (who compiled a handbook of mythology, called Genealogie, from Greek sources, probably in the 2nd cent. C. E.), Fabulae. 75; Lactantius Placidus (a commentator of the 5th or 6th cents. C. E.) on Statius, Thebais, 2.95; Fulgentius (a late 5th cent. C. E. writer of Christian persuasion from somewhere outside Rome, possibly Carthage, to whom are attributed a set of allegorical interpretations of various pagan myths), Mythologiae, 2.8; Johannes Tzetzes (a Byzantine polymath of the 12th cent. C. E., who wrote a commentary on the biographical tradition surrounding the Alexandrian poet Lycophron), Schol. on Lycophron 683; Eustathius (another Constantinopolitan scholar of the 12th cent. C. E. who compiled a vast commentary) on Homer, Od. 10.492, p.1665; Scholiast on Homer, Od. 10.494; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. G. H. Bode, vol.1, pp.5, 104, 169 (First Vatican Mythographer 16; Second Vatican Mythographer 84; Third Vatican Mythographer 4.8). The process of appropriated discourse stretches chronologically in both directions, and reflects a transhistorical trend in masculinist colonisation of the female voice.] In this regard, it should be noted that, according to Pherecydes, T was linked closely to the Theban legendary aristocracy, making him a descendant of Udaeus, one of the Spartoi. The Spartoi were men who sprang full-grown from the earth to people the new-found city of Boeotian Thebes. As is often the case when clearing the land in ancient myth, a dragon had to be killed. This done, the city’s legendary Phoenician founder, Cadmus, sowed the dragon’s teeth in ‘mother’ Earth, and a population was born. Once again, mythical figures are born, in this case literally, from the mind of man and the receptive soil of inspiration: the autochthonous ancestors of male discourse. (2) So, T is a man who once was a woman but is now a man again, and his story is the product of a man’s imagination. But focus on those words: his story. Masculine, and fictional. There is no material reality here, no sense of a concrete, discrete, historical particularity. T is a constructed individual, without the visceral or tangible affiliations of a living, breathing entity. And so his former, transformed self lacks the same characteristics. T-as-woman is a figment of masculine thought, a product of male reason. And so the details of sexual satisfaction communicated by that self may be construed in a similar fashion. [5] Another construct which illustrates these points is that of Hermaphroditus, the half-male, half-female deity who, according to Hesiod (Theog. 188-206) was born from the severed genitals of Uranus. In a similar fashion to the myth of Teiresias, we can trace the aetiology of this god/dess from the Augustan period - Ovid provides a lengthy foundation study in his Metamorphoses, and Diodoros of Sicily makes Hermaphroditus the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite (in his 1st cent. B.C.E. Bibliotheke, 4.6.5) - to extant evidence of a cult, attested in the 4th cent. B.C.E. Interestingly enough, while Hermes (Mercury) is first and foremost associated with technology and magic, trickery and deception, the archetypal goddess of love, Aphrodite (the Romanised Venus), was also known for her ambivalent female nature. Combining seductive charm, the need to procreate, and a capacity for deception, Aphrodite’s dominion can be seen as interdependent with that of the trickster god. Certainly, then, in the Graeco-Roman mythic vocabulary, a creation like Hermaphroditus subsumed many aspects of sexuality and gender which could be viewed as problematic or as generating intellectual tensions. The most startling representation of the bisexual divinity can be found today in the Terme Museum, and depicts in sculptured form the androgynous combination of youthful ephebe with developed breasts and virginal parthenos with male genitals. However, at republican Rome, natural hermaphrodites (androgyni) were regarded as ill-omened prodigies, and were liable to drowning at birth. Nowhere is the sharp divide between sociocultural construction and material reality more evident, and demands of the modern student of ancient culture a disciplined and critical response. [6] In the same way, the Egyptian god of the Nile, Hapi, was a masculine deity, given female properties because of the fertility of the Nile river. Without the Nile, of course, there would be no Egypt. Due to the duality of Egyptian thought, there were two Hapi gods – one of Upper Egypt wearing the lotus on his head, and one of Lower Egypt wearing papyrus. He was usually depicted as a blue or green coloured man with a protruding belly, carrying libation jugs. He also has full breasts, indicating his ability to nourish Egypt. Despite being a hermaphrodite god, both Hapi were given wives – Nekhebet in Upper Egypt and Uatchet in Lower Egypt. What do these myths say about ancient attitudes toward men and women, gender and sexuality? What social purpose(s) might these stories have served? These are the kinds of questions which tax the student of social history in the ancient Mediterranean world, and these are the questions which will exercise our minds briefly in tonight’s seminar on Gender, Sexuality, Body History. This seminar is designed [7] (a) to examine how men and women lived in the ancient world, the spaces they occupied, the roles they played and the laws which governed them; (b) to understand how cultures in the ancient Mediterranean defined the categories of masculine and feminine and how these categories were deployed in the discourses of literature, politics, law, religion and medicine; and, finally, (c) to consider how ancient conceptions of gender have shaped our contemporary views of male and female roles. [d] We will also address the problems posed both by literary and non-literary source materials, and the question of how the disciplines of ancient history and classical studies have dealt with the issue of gender and sexuality in the past several decades. OVERVIEW These are the aims of the seminar, but what exactly do I mean when I speak to a topic concerning “men” and “women,” “gender”, “sexuality” or “body history”, and where and when will we find that entity referred to as “the ancient world”? Perhaps it would be just as well, before entering into any discussion of terms such as “gender” or “sexuality”, to provide an overview of the chronology and cultural diversity which makes up “the ancient world” of this course. First, for “world”, substitute “Mediterranean”. While it is regrettable, a seminar like this, which seeks to treat so many time periods in any depth at all, is restricted in the scope of its perspective on the ancient world. Consequently, I will focus our attention on the extraordinarily rich variety of peoples and cultures which flourished around the basin of the “sea between lands”, the Mediterranean. In essence, the seminar traces a social and historical path through the cultural centres of a predominantly Western world. This is not to say that the margins of such a sprawling megalopolitan world are not included; this should not, however, prevent the curious and intrepid post-colonialists among you from expanding those horizons, or from seeking out points of entry into the equally valid and culturally heterogeneous worlds of African, Eurasian, and Oceanic pre- and ancient-history. World History Second, it would have been easy to deliberately compress the boundaries of this discussion into a more easily digestible survey of one or two historically particular cultural groups; for instance, the so-called “Classical” age of 5th and 4th century Athens, or the similarly resonant “Augustan” age which marks the fulcrum balancing the modern chronologies of Before and After the year “dot”, that is, the B.C. and A.D. of a Christianized world, or the coincident B.C.E. and C.E. of a secularized one. An easier path to follow, certainly, but not necessarily as rewarding, or revealing, as the one chosen. Given the fact that the “history” of humankind can be measured from its beginnings over 3 million years ago, and that for more than 99% of that huge span of time the study of past material culture is our only significant source of information, it seems appropriate to suggest that any overview of “the ancient world” should consider modern research into the biological and cultural processes of so-called “prehistoric” time. To that end, what insight into the questions of gender and sexuality can be provided by physical anthropologists and archaeologists regarding the reconstruction of the life-ways of the people responsible for the material remains of remote periods? We are clearly interested in having a clear picture of how people lived, and how they exploited their environment. But we also seek to understand why they lived that way: why they had those patterns of behaviour, and how their life-ways and material culture came to take the form they did. In other words, by explaining change through an interest in the processes of that change, the modern student of social history can move forward, formulating questions about our human past rather than simply piecing together a static jigsaw of technological, organic and environmental artifacts. [8a] Let’s look at just one aspect of this longue durée. “Once upon a time, the many cultures of this world were all part of the gynocratic age. Paternity had not yet been discovered, and it was thought ... that women bore fruit like trees—when they were ripe. Childbirth was mysterious. It was vital. And it was envied. Women were worshipped because of it, were considered superior because of it.... [b] Men were on the periphery—an interchangeable body of workers for, and worshippers of, the female centre, the principle of life. The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effect, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, the idea of male ownership of children took hold.... [c] Gynocracy also suffered from the periodic invasions of nomadic tribes.... The conflict between the hunters and the growers was really the conflict between male-dominated and female-dominated cultures. [d] ... women gradually lost their freedom, mystery, and superior position. For five thousand years or more, the gynocratic age had flowered in peace and productivity. Slowly, in varying stages and in different parts of the world, the social order was painfully reversed. Women became the underclass, marked by their visible differences.” [Gloria Steinem, “Introduction,” Wonder Woman, Phyllis Chesler (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972)] The idea that human society was matriarchal—or at least "woman-centred" and goddess-worshipping—from the Paleolithic era, 1.5 to 2 million years ago, until sometime around 3000 BCE, is at least two centuries old. There are almost as many versions of this story as there are storytellers, but these are its basic contours: (1) In a time before written records, society was centred around women. Women were revered for their mysterious life-giving powers, honoured as incarnations and priestesses of the great goddess. They reared their children to carry on their line, created both art and technology, and made important decisions for their communities. (2) Then a great transformation occurred—whether through a sudden cataclysm or a long, drawn-out sea change—and society was thereafter dominated by men. This is the culture and the mindset that we know as "patriarchy," and in which we live today. Interestingly, the idea of matriarchal prehistory is not a feminist creation, in spite of the aggressively feminist spin it has carried over the past thirty-seven years. Since the myth was revived from classical Greek sources in 1861 by Johann Jakob Bachofen, it has had—at best—a very mixed record where feminism is concerned. The majority of men who championed the myth of matriarchal prehistory during its first century (and they have mostly been men) have regarded patriarchy as an evolutionary advance over prehistoric matriarchies, in spite of some lingering nostalgia for women’s equality or beneficent rule. Feminists of the latter half of the twentieth century are not the first to find in the idea of matriarchal prehistory a manifesto for feminist social change, but this has not been the dominant meaning attached to the myth of matriarchal prehistory, only the most recent. [9] Someone associated as a prominent proponent of this idea was Marija Gimbutas, professor of European archaeology at UCLA and a prolific author of books on prehistory and archaeology. Interweaving comparative mythology, early historical sources, linguistics, ethnography and folklore, she sought to resurrect the world of Goddess-worshipping, earth-centred cultures, and to demonstrate conclusively that Goddess-worship was the root of Western civilization. By the late 60s, a reaction had set in against interpreting female images as goddesses (or as having any sacral power). The “New Archaeology” turned away from cultural analysis to an emphasis on scientific process and technology. The trend was simply to ignore the female figurines, although they were often classified in passing as “fertility idols,” “dancing girls,” “pretty ladies,” and “concubines.” Most were squirreled away in obscure journals as tiny, poorly reproduced black-and-white shots, while warriors got full-page colour treatment in The Dawn of Man-type coffee table books. There was more than a reluctance to call them goddesses; details were typically omitted about the sites where they were discovered, and in what contexts, even about dates. Most readers did not notice this blank gap amidst the extensive analysis of weapons and tool assemblages: how is it possible to evaluate information that's withheld? [10a] Such structural omissions are by no means a thing of the past. The survey of Israeli archaeology by Amnon Ben-Tor, Yigael Yadin Professor in the Archaeology of Eretz Israel at the Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University, is a paradigmatic example of this studied inattention. [Ben Tor 1992 = The Archaeology of Ancient Israel, Yale University Press and Open University, New Haven 1992 (Hebrew version, Open University, Tel Aviv 1989)]       Other than Gimbutas, it has been claimed, no other archaeologists support the “matriarchal myth.” [b] This is easily disproven by naming a few: Gro Mandt of the University of Bergen; Jiao Tianlong and Du Jinpeng of the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Kristina Berggren of the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome; and Jeanine Davis-Kimball of UC-Berkeley, who excavated the famous “Amazon” burials of the Sauromatians at Pokrovka. The range of opinions is not as monolithic as this view portrays. Davis-Kimball, for example, has said, “I think Gimbutas may have been wrong about the mother goddess per se. But she may have been right about an underlying, unbroken tradition of female cultic power and wisdom, which has been suppressed since the Middle Ages and especially since the Industrial Revolution.” [in Osborne, 1997]       [c] Tringham and Conkey, in their 1999 article “Rethinking Figurines: A Critical View from Archaeology of Gimbutas, the ‘Goddess’ and Popular Culture,” in Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence, edited by L. Goodison and C. Morris (London: British Museum Press, pp. 22-45), write that most feminist archaeologists and anthropologists are critical of the popular trend toward interpreting the wealth of ancient female images as goddesses. Unfortunately, we don’t hear from them directly. There’s no question that the dominant paradigm in archaeology is hostile to interpreting the ubiquitous female figurines as having sacred significance, whether that be as goddesses or maternal ancestors, and to matristic interpretations of prehistory. [d] Or rather, it may be more accurate to say that it is American and English archaeologists who reject these interpretations, since much more sympathetic views are found among archaeologists in other countries, for example: Shashi Asthana (1985) [= Pre-Harappan Cultures of India and the Borderlands (New Delhi)], Jacques Cauvin (2000) [= The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, Cambridge University Press], and Danny Youkana (1997) = [Tell es-Sawwan: the Architecture of the 6th Millennium BC, London: Nabu] Ancient Egypt From the “long past” of a “World history” – extending from the pre-human epochs to the Neolithic world of speculated European matriarchy – let’s travel to the Africa of ancient Egypt, and “history” in its narrow sense, meaning the study of the past using written evidence in sympathy with the finds of archaeologists. Here it is possible to traverse the Dynastic periods of Archaic, Old, Middle and New Kingdom Egypt, which cover a time-span stretching from the last years of the 3rd millennium to the late-12th century B.C.E. For our present purposes, I might shed light on a few fragmentary glimpses of a distinctively gendered worldview, garnered from a representative selection of documentary sources across the centuries. [Merneith, Neithhotep, Heterpheres, Khentkawes, NITOCRIS, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and AMENESENATEN all should be mentioned in this context.] [11a] Consider this image. The statue fragment at left once belonged to a seated human figure with right hand on lap. Although no signs of gender survive, it would have been definitely male or female. Parallels make it clear that it was originally part of a group statue, very possibly representing a husband and wife. Many representations of human beings from ancient Egypt were gendered in some way. Such images were intended and recognizable as either male or female, along with a few other gender categories. Aside from representations of difference in biological sex, gender could be indicated in Egyptian art by position of human figures with respect to each other, relative size, and colour differences. Thus seemingly ungendered representations of people almost always indicate that the image is unfinished, incomplete, or damaged in such a way as to remove the signs of gender (obvious or not) from it. Few objects from ancient Egypt have reached us in perfect condition so it is not surprising that in many representations of people the gender is uncertain. Some images, however, were not explicitly gendered, often to serve the very practical expedient of being able to represent any gender. [11b] Let’s try something more substantial. The funerary stela at right depicts a husband and wife performing acts of worship before the Mnevis bull. The husband stands in front, the wife behind. To some extent, the gendered activities of Egyptian deities mirrored the lives of their mortal worshippers. Thus, the kings, rulers, fighters, and administrators of the gods tend to be male, while goddesses serve as queens, nurturers, childbearers, and protectors of the gods. [12] What about this? The funerary stela at left depicts a priest making offerings to the goddess Isis, identified in the text to the right as the “divine mother.”  Some goddesses served merely as characterless consorts to gods, but others assumed special functions. Isis not only embodied the idea of motherhood but was also endowed with exceptional magical powers. Hathor was a popular goddess associated with music, dancing, and pleasure but also had a wrathful aspect that could threaten to destroy humanity. The sky was the body of the goddess Nut, while storms were personified by goddesses like Sakhmet and Tefnut. Divine personifications of abstract concepts tended to be goddesses, the best-known being Ma’at, the personification of truth, order, and the like. Goddesses were often identified with animals that embodied qualities associated with the deity. The coming of Greek religion in the Graeco-Roman period brought new gods and goddesses and new religious traditions to Egypt, but the old traditions remained active; indeed, the two were often combined. Thus, the Greek goddess Aphrodite was worshipped alongside the Egyptian goddess Isis, and the attributes of the two were merged in Isis-Aphrodite. By the fourth century CE Christianity had gradually supplanted the older religions, but the iconography of early Christianity adapted many earlier forms, and the old Egyptian gods and goddesses were still evoked in magical texts. [13] So to this object. The coffin fragment you see here belonged to the coffin of a female musician for the god Amun. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, roles in religious employment were connected to the gender of the employee. In general, men were in charge of temples and their administration, but women filled a variety of religious offices in the Pharaonic period, especially as priestesses associated with the cults of such goddesses as Hathor. By the New Kingdom, however, the priesthood had become part of the state bureaucracy, which excluded women. As if to compensate, we find an increase in the number of elite women associated with temples as ‘musicians’ of a particular deity. In the Graeco-Roman period, women filled various priestly roles. Under Christianity, however, they were again excluded from formal religious office in Egypt. Female officiants were often associated with the cults of female deities, although by far the most common female religious titles relate to the worship of male gods. Similarly, male priests often officiated for goddesses. [14] A special class of protective images like this one was named for Isis’ son Horus. Known as the Horus cippus, such an image provided magical protection for young children. Perhaps the best-attested religious practices of the ancient Egyptians are those connected with death and burial. [15a] The Egyptians conceived of the afterlife as an extension of their daily life on earth that had to be carefully planned for. The dead body was prepared and protected, both through physical embalming and through funerary texts designed to ensure a smooth transition to the afterlife. Artifacts of the Egyptian preparations for life after death show this to have been an endeavour open to both men and women. Preparations for the afterlife also invoked the specific protection of goddesses such as Isis and Nut; in general, goddesses tended to serve as protectors of the dead. Note here in depictions of Sennedjem and his family the spatial and dimensional relations between [b] adult and child, and between [c] male and female. Finally, when studying men, women, gender and sexuality in ancient Egypt, scholars frequently ask questions relating to power, beginning with the ruler of Egypt. Pharaonic Egypt was ruled by a king, as was Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Egyptian ideal of succession for the kingship was from father to son. Even so, the female relatives of the ruling king often played significant roles in the rule of Egypt, while the ideology of kingship itself was a careful blend of male and female elements. Women who ruled independently as king were unusual in Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt, but this did occur, most often in times of uncertainty over succession; the best-known examples are Hatshepsut (from the 18th Dynasty) and Cleopatra VII (from the Ptolemaic period). Even after Egypt was no longer governed by a resident ruler, images of women in power came to Egypt from Rome through representations, especially those on coins. [16a] Consider this stela. Merneith is one of the most disputed persons of the archaic period. Not all the scholars agree with the eventuality that she could actually have reigned. It is sure that she was Horus Den’s mother as shown on a seal impression recently discovered in the Tomb T of Umm el Qa'ab. She is ‘mwt nswt’ beside the name of Den, thus it is also probable that she was the Horus Djet’s wife (Lauer, 1966, speculated a further parentage as Horus Djer’s daughter, but that’s not provable). Her Abydos tomb (Y) is close to that of the husband Djet (Z). The stela here, now in the Louvre, was found outside the tomb by Petrie in 1900. The excavator first thought it belonged to a male ruler. At Abydos there is also Merneith’s funerary enclosure; it’s the easternmost of the group built N.E. of Peribsen’s Western Mastaba and S.E. of the enclosure of Djet. The Saqqara mastaba 3503 is the only one that can be attributed to her; it’s just north of S 3504 (Sekhemkasedj) of the reign of Djet. The seal impressions are named to Den. The reign of a female ruler, already before the middle of the first dynasty, must not seem too strange: her husband Djet could have died after a brief reign of about 10 years (probably he began to reign – and married – when he was already old because his predecessor Djer had a very long reign) and her son Den could have been too young for the throne. Anyhow there is no title or serekh which could clarify the position she held. The mentioned seal impression of Den did name Merneith but the similar piece dated to Qa'a omits this queen. [b] To the right is a statue of MaatKaRe Hatshepsut bringing offerings to her father the sun god Amun. Many will observe that, since she wears the false beard, she tried to behave as a man to be a pharaoh. What then about British male judges with long white wigs, do they try to become women? The fact is rather that she, as all female and male pharaohs, wore the ceremonial outfit of a pharaoh. How would you characterize the representation of Hatshepsut here – that is, does the statue show her as a man or a woman? As you may know, this is the only surviving representation in statuary of Hatshepsut as a female. Below the level of kingship women did hold office, most often in religious institutions, but were largely excluded from administrative roles. The title most frequently held by women was “mistress of the house”; this does not, however, seem to be a courtesy title or expression for “housewife” but rather a genuine recognition of the organisational and business abilities necessary to administer a household. Other titles seem to allude to marital status. Women were frequently identified by their husband and his occupation but still had considerable theoretical autonomy in legal and economic situations. This Egyptian tradition persisted even after the introduction of Greek and Roman attitudes and legal traditions, which more heavily restricted women's activities and status. It is not surprising that many women, including perhaps some of non-Egyptian ethnic origin, chose to follow Egyptian custom. Indeed, Egyptian traditions about the status and autonomy of women seem to have persisted into the Late Antique period and beyond. The status of women in Egypt was clearly different from that in much of the ancient world. But bear in mind that most sources reflect the experiences of elite women and men. Non-elites probably had considerably less autonomy in general, and, since many of the observable trends in the autonomy of elite women are tied to ownership and property, it is likely that the experience of non-elite women was very different from that of their elite counterparts. Further, it is important to remember that throughout Egyptian history many positions of power, such as most administrative offices and military ranks, were exclusively held by men. [17a] In the Middle Kingdom, for example, a husband could draw up an imyt-pr, a ‘house document,’ which was a legal unilateral deed for donating property. As a living will, it was made and perhaps executed while the husband was still alive. In this will, the husband would assign to his wife what he wished of his own private property, i.e., what he acquired before his marriage. An example of this is the imyt-pr of Wah from el-Lahun. A woman could also freely disinherit children of her private property, i.e., the property she brought to her marriage or her share of the community property. She could selectively bequeath that property to certain children and not to others. Such action is recorded in the Will of Naunakht. [b] Naunakht was a well-to-do old woman who lived in the workmen's village at Deir el-Medina during the New Kingdom. She had married twice. Her first husband was the village scribe, Kenherkhepshef. He died childless leaving all his property to Naunakht. She inherited his sizeable estate, as well as owned considerable private property from her own father. She remarried and had eight children with her new husband. The private property she owned before her second marriage remained her own. When she and her second husband were fairly old, she drew up a will and convened a large public forum in the village, in which she proclaimed her will to everyone, publicly disinheriting four of her eight children of her one-third share of the community property arising from her present marriage, as well as all of her private property. Specifically, this disinheritance did not affect the children's share of the two- thirds of the community property which she shared with her present husband. The legal basis for her action was her claim that these four children were neglecting her needs in her old age. The husband and all the children had to swear publically that they (and thus their heirs in perpetuity) would abide by the terms of her will and not contest it at some later time. [c] Egyptian women had the right to bring lawsuits against anyone in open court, and there was no gender-based bias against them, and we have many cases of women winning their claims. A good example of this fact is found in the Inscription of Mes. This inscription is the actual court record of a long and drawn-out private land dispute which occurred in the New Kingdom under the rule of Rameses II. Significantly, the inscription shows us four things: (1) women could manage property, and they could inherit trusteeship of property; (2) women could institute litigation (and appeal to the court of the vizier); (3) women were awarded legal decisions (and had decisions reversed on appeal); (4) women acted as witnesses before a court of law. Bronze Age Greece At first glance, the Homeric and Archaic ages of mainland European Greece might seem far more than a sea-voyage distant (in intellectual and social terms at least) from the Afroasiatic civilisation of Pharaonic Egypt. But it will be as well to keep the Egyptian standpoint on the position of women and the boundaries of sexuality in mind when we first encounter the Greek world of the Dark Age bards. The 8th century B.C.E. Bronze Age world of the Homeric poets casts an enormous shadow over the so-called “Classical” Greek civilisation which followed. But there is a thread of scholarship - regarded with equal fervour by philologists, ancient historians and archaeologists alike as either theoretically audacious or empirically misguided - which focuses on Greek cultural borrowings from Egypt and Levantine Asia in the 2nd millennium B.C.E. To be more precise, in the thousand years from 2100 to 1100 B.C.E., this historiographical revision of Greek cultural heritage proposes a scheme in which there seems to have been more or less continuous Near Eastern influence on the Aegean over this period, its intensity varying considerably at different times. Even in the study of religion and art of the Archaic period, the near-eastern element has recently been stressed, though this too is a controversial topic. Regardless of the continuing debate in academic circles over the tenure of this hypothesis - over its claims for Egyptian colonies in Boeotian Thebes and mainland Athens, its historicist claims for an Egyptian conquest of the Argolid and the Phoenician foundation of Thebes, and its support for ancient traditions of colonization predating the rise of Hellenic culture - the world of pre-classical Greece deserves a fresh reading with respect to observable trends in the transmission of sexual ideologies. The oral-literate universes of epic and instructive poetry (the Iliad and Odyssey ascribed to Homer, and the Theogony, the Catalogue of Women, and the Work and Days of his contemporary Hesiod) will provide us with a way into the mentalite of this fascinating age. [18] As just one example, if the Theogony is about anything, it is about birth, the “birth of the gods” which is what the title means. In this early creation-time, the gods are synonymous with the universe (cosmos) and the order of the universe (cosmos). Yet throughout the Theogony, the gods behave in a most disorderly fashion. Why is this? There are many interesting answers to this question, but here's a start. The poem presents the creation of the gods and the universe and the consolidation of the gods' power as a struggle between fathers and sons and between male force and female birth. As you read the Theogony, you will become aware that its author, Hesiod, shows a clear bias for the eventual winner of the fathers-sons struggle, the male sky-god Zeus, and a bias for the male against the female. In other words, it is probable that Hesiod slants or distorts parts of some stories in order to make Zeus and the male powers of brute force look good and to make the female powers focused around the natural cycle of birth and death look bad. [19a] Yet this selfsame discourse produced, transmitted and perpetuated something like the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (L & F 393, pp.278-80). Of course, the ‘bad guys’ - the rapist Hades, his conspiratorial brother Zeus, and the trickster con-man par excellence Hermes - win out in the end. But is it accidental that we are also able to perceive a kind of subjective experience in the midst of what is readily identifiable as a product of masculinist epic tradition? Sure, the patriarchal cosmic order is on display for all to see; however, in deliberate contrast to the ‘public text’ of whatever community celebration or performance was to follow (be it religious festival or traditional poetry contest), the Hymn emphasises the female principle. There is a female centre of gravity – a female experience, if you like – which informs and holds the piece together. Consequently, the poet-singer (whether male or female) effectively (and publicly) ruptures the official mythological line. S/he modifies the perspective in Hesiod’s Theogony (L & F 56, p.25) on the role of gender conflict in cosmology and the portrait of patriarchal order given in Homeric epic. In other words, the Hymn may well be inscribed within the dominant phallogocentric mode of discourse, but its treatment of mythic relationships (human and divine) may equally be viewed as (potentially) antagonistic to it. [b] The same can also be said of the distinctive poetry which emerged from the island of Lesbos in the second half of the 7th century B.C.E. Like the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the extant fragments of the so-called Sappho-singer (L & F 1-6, pp.2-4) seem to be constructed in ways which clash with the codes inherent in male poetic discourse. This Sapphic voice - artistic construction, though it undoubtedly is - speaks of esoteric practices, affectionate understandings, and explicitly female creativities. She may use the language of rhetoric or cult, and incorporate aural and mythical reminiscences of Homeric verse, but the lyric fragments sing with an unequivocally woman’s voice. It is almost as if - by devising, composing and delivering these dramatic, confessional, woman-centred versions of eros and suppliant prayer - the lyricist intended to appropriate or convert elements of male culture for some historically contextualised purpose. As such, though synthetic and highly idealised (as the medium of poetry is wont to be in any age), is it legitimate to see in the Sappho-singer’s verse a refraction of women’s lived realities and confrontations with experience? That is, of necessity, the repertory of poetic discourses we term a Sapphic voice embraced a largely traditional (and extensive) stock of themes, verse forms, melodies, tropes and imagery. But at the same time, it affords us insights into patterns of social ideology formulated and promulgated among a group of elite Greek women. While the Hymn to Demeter may be seen to modify the perspective in Hesiod’s Theogony on the role of gender conflict in cosmology, and the portrait of patriarchal order given in Homeric epic, the reverse transposition of archaic social and gendered subject positions by the poet-singer of Iliad and Odyssey lacked motivation, much less articulation. As such, for the epic bard, the heroic quest must align itself along a fixed, masculinist line of metanarrative: acceptance of death mitigated by fame; for the Eleusinian hymnist, the paradigm for Demeter’s quest is receptive, communitarian, and decidedly female: in this schema, cyclical reunion and separation mitigates death. In the final analysis (and, it must be said, a very sketchy one at that), to talk of Homeric women or archaic women (or Egyptian women, for that matter) as though they were a homogeneous group is itself misleading. Since ancient Egypt was a hierarchical society and half the population was female, women too were ranked hierarchically, and women of the royal family, of the elite scribal class, of the minor professional class, and of the peasantry would have had little in common except their ability to bear children. At the same time, conformity not individuality was prized, and both men and women had predetermined roles in a society which looked to the past for its models. As Gay Robins notes in the introduction to her study of Women in Ancient Egypt, whether women were consciously aware of the many gender distinctions in their society and, further, resented them can never be known, since we have no surviving record expressing their attitudes and opinions (Introduction, 19). So, too, the student of prehistoric, Dark Age and archaic Greek social history is presented with a variegated admixture of evidence. Chapters 2 and 3 of Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves bear ample testimony to the extremities. From the islands of the Mediterranean and Aegean to the Laconian plain of the southern Peloponnesus, the pre-Classical period provides us with clues to societies in which women were valued and admired. The snake-priestesses of Bronze Age Minoan Crete, the Dorian women of Gortyn and of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus, and the Sappho-singers of Anatolian Lesbos - all speak of social contexts which (in one way or another) warp, subvert or transgress the dominant logocentric regimes and practices of Homeric discourse. But it is the dactylic hexameter of guest-friendship and honour, of warrior-kings and kleos, which pervades the gender consciousness of a ‘colonizing’ Greek mentalite in modern historiographical studies of the period. Whether Ionic-Attic, Arcado-Cyprian, Aeolic, Doric, or North-West Greek, epic poetry comprised a lexicon which articulated gender segregation in the most simplistic and (oftentimes) brutal terms. By the same token, when we speak of Greek we often mean the dialect of Athens. Just as Sappho, Hagesichora, and the wedding-singers of Sparta find a fragmentary voice in the midst of an agonistic male din, so from the Mycenaean period until the late Hellenistic period there was no standard Greek language and all cities or regions had different forms of speech, which had equal or similar status and presumably were mutually intelligible. Perhaps other female voices flourished in micro-historical time and space, unrecoverable in material reality yet susceptible to reconstruction in the fading evocation of the daughters of Isis and Pandora. Classical Greece [20a] There is a wealth of literary and archaeological evidence which helps us to reconstruct socio-cultural images of women in the period spanning the end of the Lyric Age to the intensely studied Classical Age of 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E. Greece. This survey of mainstream and non-canonical “explanations” for the position and role of women will focus on such concepts as the categorisation of the female (as citizen women, concubines, courtesans and prostitutes) and [b] the construction of social realities (of women as subordinate or passive, indwelling or secluded, organic or of the natural world). [c] These explanations lead to a number of issues which continue to render the study of gender and sexuality in Classical Greece absorbing and problematic: domestic and public space; marriage and citizenship; homoerotic attachment and heterosexist interpretation; reproduction and the continuity of generations. Sex and Gender “What is sex?” and “What is gender?” The terms are bandied about almost interchangeably in discussions of popular culture, but all vocabulary dealing with such fundamental conceptions of culture and identity requires a more critical interrogation. Let’s start with a possibly simplistic definition, and see where it takes us. Sex and sexuality refer to the biological aspects of femaleness and maleness; gender (femininity or masculinity) is a social category imposed on a sexual body. In other words, the sexual nature of an individual woman or man may be regarded as a “given” entity (a biological or physiological reality), whereas the various representations, cultural articulations, or collective and individual expressions of that sexuality may be construed as the cumulative effect of multiple social discourses. But wait! There’s more. . . Even at the outset, I think it should be clear that this standpoint on sexuality and gender rings a few linguistic and epistemological “alarm bells”. If we accept that the quantity of being female or male somehow is a reality of nature - that is, a timeless, universal entity, a cultural invariant - then we must also accommodate a structural division between material things and mental representations, objects and words, bodies and minds, nature and culture. Following this schema, my status as “male” cannot be questioned, only the ways in which I conform with or deviate from the category of “masculine”. A moot point, you may say. But consider this. In the ancient Mediterranean, as elsewhere, Greeks, Romans, and their neighbours have left definitions of sexual norms, obscenity, and sexual practice and identity. Their systems have usefully been compared with anthropological accounts of modern Mediterranean and other cultures. In this ancient social environment, sexuality recapitulated power relations within individual cultures. If this is so, then the biological “given” of sexuality may just as easily reside in those same discursive and institutional practices, as well as in the experiences, preferences and identities which they construct. Before confusion sets in, let me attempt to clarify the contours of this slippery cognitive and semantic terrain. Gender, in this lecture, means knowledge about sexual difference. For the purposes of this definition, knowledge may be taken to mean the understanding produced by cultures and societies of human relationships, in this case of those between men and women. Such knowledge is not absolute or true, but always relative. A contentious framework, but ultimately satisfying in the overall framework of this seminar. Gender, then, is the social organisation of sexual difference. But this does not mean that gender reflects or implements fixed and natural physical differences between women and men; rather, gender is the knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences. As the American scholar of social history, Joan Wallach Scott, notes in her 1985 collection of essays, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press), [21a] “Meanings [for bodily differences] vary across cultures, social groups, and time since nothing about the body, including women’s reproductive organs, determines univocally how social divisions will be shaped. We cannot see sexual difference except as a function of our knowledge about the body and that knowledge is not ‘pure’, cannot be isolated from its implication in a broad range of discursive contexts. Sexual difference is not, then, the originary cause from which social organisation ultimately can be derived. It is instead a variable social organisation that itself must be explained.” (1985: 2) Once this understanding of gender is recognised, the complicity of the historical record in the process of producing knowledge about sexual difference should be apparent. Most particularly, history’s representations of the past help construct gender for the present. “Male” I may be, but from where does this notional lived reality spring? Like the Spartoi of Boeotian Thebes, or the doubly-sexed Teiresias, or the bisexual Hermaphroditus, the “transparent” categories of woman and man originate in repositories of customary practice. Constructed and legitimated within multiple social histories, these artificial divisions have been maintained and limited by dominant hierarchies of race, nation, and status, as well as gender. And so, by way of illustration, while the bisexual deity Hermaphroditus was celebrated in the Metamorphoses (or “Transformations”) of the Roman poet Ovid, and provided with a legitimate genealogy in the Bibliotheke (or “Library”) of the Greek historian Diodoros of Agyrium in Sicily, the natural hermaphrodites of republican Rome (the so-called androgyni) were regarded as ill-omened prodigies and liable to drowning at birth. A society which abides by the precepts of biological essentialism cannot harbour even the suggestion of a material reality which conflicts with or deviates from the sociocultural norm, and will only tolerate such aberrant conceptions in the anomalous derangements of the world of (male?) imagination. As David Halperin, author of the still-contentious 1990 publication, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (London: Routledge), notes: [b] “Ancient sexual typologies construed sexual desire as normative or deviant, according to conformity to or violation of conventionally defined gender roles.” (1990: 21) So, gender may be viewed as a social category imposed on a sexual body, but take care to acknowledge the categorical assumptions (the ‘body of knowledge’) underpinning our knowledge of that body. Perhaps it would be better to follow the lead of Marilyn B. Skinner (Professor of Classics at the University of Arizona and editor of the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association). In her introduction to a recent collection of essays on Roman Sexualities, which she co-edited with Judith P. Hallett (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press), [22] Skinner defines the indigenous ideology of the Graeco-Roman sex/gender system as “the cultural interpretation of the human body’s erogenous zones and sexual capacities” (1997: 3). Put another way, sexual identity does not relate so much to gender role as to the separation of kinds of sexual predilection and degrees of masculinity or femininity. Sex/Gender, Active/Passive: Artifice and Orifice If we accept the parameters of this definition, then it is possible to approach the ways in which sex/gender were understood in antiquity with greater confidence in our critical sensibilities. The very first (modern) conception of sexuality which requires readjustment relates to the equation of sexual preference and gender. To be specific, the idea that a woman may be emotionally or physically attracted to a man or another woman, or that a man may be similarly attracted to a woman or another man, demands radical reappraisal. For it is not so much the biological sex or enculturated gender of the recipient of desire or affection that is in question; rather, it is a matter of social relations, and hinges on issues of power, dominance and submission. Let’s simplify the theory. Holt N. Parker synthesises the matter nicely: “In contemporary Western society, we base our division of sexual categories on the axis of same versus other. Our primary division rests on the genders of the people involved. Thus, we have heterosexuals, who have sex with persons of different gender, and homosexuals, who have sex with persons of the same gender. This classification is a rather parochial affair and (according to commentators aligned with various disciplines) a comparatively recent development even in the culture of the West. It is abundantly clear from the anthropological record that this feature is simply not used in numerous other cultures. In such other cultures, sexual categories are based on divisions of age, social status, ritual category, or power relations, and often cut across or simply ignore the biological classes of male and female. Gender may not appear at all, or only as a secondary feature; and even when it does, the axis of same versus other may be irrelevant to the definition of sexual categories. Not only are lines drawn in different places, but more than two genders are recognised by various cultures. Our hetero- versus homo-categories make no sense in a culture where one has more than two choices.” (“The Teratogenic Grid”, in Hallett and Skinner (eds: 1997): 47) In other words, our “ancient world” - the Mediterranean milieu of the “short past” - did not base its classification on gender and a dichotomy of sexual preference, but on a completely different axis, that of active versus passive. In view of the multiple ethnic and cultural units which inhabit ancient Mediterranean space and time, it is reasonable to ask whether or not such an axis of social organisation can be applied in the same way as our modern Western mind-set on sexuality is so often taken as a universal constant. Any adequate response to this question for the critical social historian must be derived from the primary source material. It is, after all, the only window we possess (however opaque or refractive that surface may be) through which to apprehend the ancient mind and heart. Now, it is the purpose of this course to explore just such an issue in some depth, week by week, and in as discriminating and specific a fashion as time permits. But, to provide at least the bare bones of a framework upon which to hang these sweeping and far-reaching assertions about gender and sexuality, let’s look very briefly at three instances of the phenomenon, and you can judge the merits of the argument accordingly. [23] First, consider the following snippets from the so-called “wisdom literature” of ancient Egypt: from the instructions of Ptah-hotep, a vizier of the Old Kingdom (the early 2nd millennium B.C.): “When you prosper and found your house, and love your wife with ardour, fill her belly, clothe her back, ointment soothes her body. Gladden her heart as long as you live, she is a fertile field for her lord. Do not contend with her in court, keep her from power, restrain her - her eye is her storm when she gazes - thus will you make her stay in your house.” from the instructions of Any, a minor official of the New Kingdom (mid- to late-2nd milennium): “Take a wife while you’re young, that she make a son for you; she should bear for you while you’re youthful, it is proper to make people. Happy the man whose people are many, he is saluted on account of his progeny.” from the instructions of Ankhsheshony, a priest of the Ptolemaic period (the last 3 centuries before the Common Era): “Do not marry an impious women, lest she give your children an impious upbringing. If a woman is at peace with her husband [they will never] fare badly. If a woman whispers about her husband, she has another man [in her] heart. A low woman does not have a life. A bad woman does not have a husband.” from the so-called Papyrus Insinger (dating to the Roman period, ca. 1st cent. C. E.): “If a woman is beautiful you should show you are superior to her. A good woman who does not love another man in her family is a wise woman. The women who follow this teaching are rarely bad. Their good condition comes about through the god’s command. There is she who fills her house with wealth without there being an income. There is she who is the praised mistress of the house by virtue of her character. There is she whom I hold in contempt as an evil woman.” [translations from Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature. 3 vols: 1973-80 (Berkeley)] Selective, I know, but the emphasis is clear, and the excerpts are drawn from contexts which reflect the growth and development of Egyptian society (from a radical form of aristocracy to a kind of democracy). However, you should be aware that this type of “literature” comprised instructions from a father to his eldest son. These pieces of advice eventually came to be regarded as maxims for living. But for whose life? In every case, the audience towards whom the father, lord, and master of the house directs his wisdom is the well-heeled, educated, eldest male of the kinship group. Representing idealised behaviour, these words of wisdom (in modern terms, a discourse of power and knowledge) were copied in each period of Egyptian history, reifying or making canonical a medium which propagated a variety of specific, sexualised meanings. In many cases, it is easy to detect the idealisation or objectification of a typology of gender relations, in which the female is acted upon or represented as subordinate in relation to a superordinate and dominant male. This function of a sex/gender system which operates in compliance with an active/passive frame of reference can be subverted, of course, but only within the domain of the imagination. [24] Such a reversal of roles can be found if one reads from the collections of love poetry contained in such New Kingdom documents as Chester Beatty Roman I and Papyrus Harris. The following has been attributed to Nakht Sobek, a scribe of the community of workmen at Deir el-Medina, who lived during the rules of those who followed Rameses III: “Please come quick to the lady love like the king’s steed, the pick of a thousand from all the herds, the foremost of the stables. It is set apart from the others in its feed and its master knows its gaits. As soon as it hears the crack of a whip it knows no holding back. There’s not a captain in the chariotry who can pull ahead of it, but well the lady love knows he can not go far from her.” (from Papyrus Chester Beatty I, in W. K. Simpson et al, The Literature of Ancient Egypt no.47: 325) Although it’s difficult to appreciate the literary form because of the consonantal nature of hieroglyphic, some elements of composition can be recognised. Most pertinently, it is a fictional space, containing the wish to belong to a different social setting (the aristocratic and bucolic or pastoral realm of Nakht Sobek’s employers), and including a desire for the lover to be the servant of the other (overturning the expected symbolic order). It is a fantasy world, of young, courting couples and unattached, free lovers. The scenario appears unlikely, and may be attributed to desires bearing little relationship to the real world. In any event, the point has been made. The sexual conventions of a cultural system which is predicated on hierarchical relations and power differentials often acquire the self-confirming inner truth of “nature”, at least in terms of the intellectual allegiance or conviction propounded in discourses like the “instructions” we have heard today from viziers, priests and scribes - the economically-advantaged, politically-powerful, educated and literate males of a transhistorical Egyptian social structure. Let’s leave Afroasiatic Egypt now, and travel nor’-nor’-east and forward some 600 years to the world of classical Athens. There is no better introduction to the cultural divide between modern and ancient conceptions of gender and sexuality than the mythical taxonomy of human beings proposed by the fictional comedic playwright and poet of Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes. [Read excerpts from the speech of Aristophanes: 189a and ff.] According to the Platonic Aristophanes, who is the fourth reported speaker in the Symposium’s series of encomia on Eros, humans were originally fantastic creatures, with [25a] “the whole of each human being round in form, with its back and sides in a circle, with four arms, an equal number of legs, and two faces, identical in every way, on a circular neck.” (189e5-90a1) [Continue from 190a1-b1.] Now, when their strength and insolence became a threat to the gods, Zeus decided to split them apart, but then partially relented and gave them sexual desire so they would not die out altogether. [Read 191c6-8.] We now walk around, Aristophanes says, as mere tallies - symbola - of our former selves, constantly seeking our missing halves. Those who were halves of female or male wholes seek partners of the same sex, while those of androgyne origin seek partners of the other sex. [Read 191d3-192a2.] There is no telling how Aristophanes’s speech would have struck an ancient listener or reader, and we cannot even be sure whether or not it is supposed to bring a smile to our lips. It certainly will if it’s read with that assumption. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll not attempt to judge Plato’s intention. What is striking, and what is right to talk about is Plato’s unprecedented and shattering discovery that the genuine object of eros - whatever it is - does not belong to the same order of reality as the objects intended by the human appetites. That is, while a ‘surface’ reading of Aristophanes’ mythos suggests an essentialist interpretation - John Boswell, in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 53, goes so far as to claim the myth as rough demographic evidence for the approximate equal distribution of gays, straights, and lesbians in fourth-century Athens - the speech must be understood in terms of Plato’s own textual, philosophic, and erotic strategies. Any reference to an external social reality - even assuming that we know what that social reality is and how to distinguish it from our own - is at best secondary. [25b] The speech identifies 3 distinct sexualities: M-M, F-F, and M-F/F-M, or male, female and androgyne. The first two (M-M and F-F) do not belong to a category in contradistinction to M-F/F-M. Thus the sexual taxonomy of the human race is as follows: men who love men; women who love women; men who are immoderately mad for women (“philogynaikes and the majority of adulterers”, 191d7-8); women who are immoderately mad for men (“philandroi and adulteresses”, 191e1). [c] In this regard, the words philogynaikes and philandroi might best be translated as “woman-crazy” and “man-crazy”. We expect to find a category of “normal” heterosexuality; that is, one in which eros directed toward the opposite gender is combined with respect for social norms and is accompanied by moderate rather than excessive desire. Yet this category - an important and necessary back-formation if we posit an essential category of homosexuality - is elided, and we cannot even find “normal” heterosexual desire, much less “normal” heterosexuality. The implications of Aristophanes’ taxonomy is as radical for male homoerotic desire. The traditional, popular dichotomy of desire - in which the passive, young, male beloved (the eromenos) is thought to lack sexual interest in his older male lover (the erastes) - suffers a similar break to the hermaphroditic model’s deviation from the commonly perceived pattern. As Aristophanes tells his audience, [26a] “While they’re boys, because they were sliced from the male gender, they fall in love with men, they enjoy sex with men and they like to be embraced by men.” (191e4) In other words, if sexual desire is a symbolic substitute for the originary object once loved and lost in some archaic trauma, then - despite evidence for different preferences and tastes - people are not individuated at the level of their sexual being. For Plato, discussion of sex focusses on pleasure and procreation. Recall that Zeus moved the genitals of the surviving originary ‘gender-benders’ round to their fronts to ensure that [26b] “. . .when couples embraced, as well as male-female relationships leading to procreation and offspring, male-male relationships would at least involve sexual satisfaction. . .” (191c) That is because he did not classify kinds of sexual desire or behaviour according to the sameness or difference of the sexes of the persons who engaged in a sexual act; rather, he evaluated sexual acts according to the degree to which such acts either violated or conformed to norms of conduct deemed appropriate to individual sexual actors by reason of their gender, age, and social status. It is therefore impossible to speak in general terms about Plato’s (and, by extension, ancient Greek society’s) attitudes to ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘homosexuality’, or about the degree of acceptance or toleration of either by particular communities, because any such statement would, in effect, lump together various behaviours which the ancients themselves kept rigorously distinct and to which they attached radically divergent meanings and values. Herein lies the crux of the ancient active/passive grid of sexuality. Heterosexual acts (not people) were distinguished from homosexual acts not as radically differing pleasures but primarily on the basis of social consequence: only the former produce children. This socially operative categorisation of personal and public life has a fundamental impact on ancient attitudes and practices. What was more important in heterosexual acts was the status of the woman and the man’s degree of responsibility towards her and her offspring. The purpose of wives was to produce legitimate children. Marriage was primarily a nexus of social and economic exchange. Love between husband and wife was neither expected nor necessary. Control of wives’ sexuality was important to assure the reproductive legitimacy of the children and so social stability. Pleasures, on the other hand, were categorised and valued in terms of sexual penetration and phallic satisfaction, whether the sexual partners were two males, two females, or one female and one male. The physical act of sex itself required, in their eyes, a polarisation of the sexual partners into the categories of penetrator and penetrated as well as a corresponding polarisation of sexual roles into ‘active’ and ‘passive’. These roles in turn were correlated with superordinate and subordinate social status, with masculine and feminine gender styles, and (in the case of males, at least) with adulthood and adolescence. Phallic insertion functioned as a marker of male precedence; it also expressed social domination and seniority. The isomorphism of sexual, social, gender, and age roles made the distinction between ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’ paramount for categorising sexual acts and actors of either gender; the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual contacts could still be invoked for certain purposes (e.g., Ovid, Ars amatoria 2.682-4; Achilles Tatius 2.33-8), but it remained of comparatively minor taxonomic and ethical significance. In the sex/gender system of Plato’s Athens, this ethos of penetration and domination (a socio-sexual discourse structured by the presence/absence of the phallus) requires a differential gendering of desire and power. Simply put, men have wide-ranging, object-directed and acquisitive desires, and the social authority to act on these desires, whereas women, boys, and slaves are rendered objectless, passive, and determined by a somatic need for phallic irrigation. Is this kind of sexuality (which features a rigid hierarchy of sexual roles that reflect a set of socially articulated power-relations rather than the determinate sexual orientations of those involved) a recognisable system in other ancient Mediterranean cultures? For better or worse, the answer would appear to be in the affirmative. As a final instance of the revolutionary difference between the sexual world of ancient and modern societies, I would like to consider for a moment the phallocentric vocabulary of Roman culture. Although the following schema is deliberately reductionist in principle, designed to strip the taxonomy of sexual acts down to its essentials, it is also intended to generate comprehension of the often unarticulated expectations governing normative sexuality and sexual conduct in a spectrum of lifestyles and activities; that is, the complex intersections of sexual subject positions with class and ethnic status. [27] [Display overhead of the dominance-submission grid of Roman sexualities.] Latin has a single verb for each sexually determinative act: futuere, ‘to insert one’s penis in someone’s vagina’; pedicare, ‘to insert one’s penis in someone’s anus’; and irrumare, ‘to insert one’s penis in someone’s mouth’. The vocabulary is purely anatomical and clinically precise about what is going where. In this schema, the normal male, vir, energetically penetrates his object through one of the three orifices: the vagina, the anus, or the mouth. By definition, the female recipient, the femina or puella, is penetrable through each orifice. The symmetrical economy of the system also constructs monstrous antitypes of ‘passive’ man and ‘active’ woman, namely the cinaedus or fellator and the tribas. Anal and oral receptivity, the two modalities of passive male behaviour, are themselves designated as discrete preferences. It should be clear that imposition of the contemporary terms ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘homosexuality’ on the ancient Roman schematisation of sexual behaviour is fraught with difficulty. Perhaps the most disturbing implication of this structural ontology is that, strictly speaking, a woman in Roman sexual discourse (femina/puella) is defined as “one who is penetrated in the vagina”, nothing more or less than the radical objectification of a human being to the principles of pleasure and reproductive continuity. The Hellenistic Age This intensive look at Greek sexuality brings us to the period known as the Hellenistic Age, that which extended between Alexander the Great and the victory of Octavian (later Augustus) at Actium, conventionally from around 336 to a little after 31 B.C.E. Again, the post-colonial, late 20th century has reacted against such a simple picture (which derives in large part from the 19th-century historian J. G. Droysen’s definition of Hellenismus). Arguably, in the Droysenian and post-Droysen view of the ancient world, the diffusion of Greek culture through the Mediterranean basin in the post-Alexander period neglects non-Greek (especially Semitic) contributions to Greek achievements. Keeping this recurrent re-examination of cultural ‘givens’ in mind, it is possible to look at the ways in which highly traditional Greek forms of discourse (from philosophical and medical treatises to the literary and visual media of the times) were used to negotiate a relationship with non-Greek culture in the Hellenistic period. The retention or reinvention of local cultural forms, going right through the history of post-Classical Europe, Asia Minor and Africa, impacts enormously on our understanding and interpretation of indigenous and Graeco-Macedonian views of sexuality, the body and gender. The Roman World At Rome, too, the acceptance or rejection of cultural Hellenism remained an issue, even after the possibility of Greek or Macedonian military or political victories over Rome had evaporated. To be precise, whether we speak of Archaic Rome (traditionally dated to 753 B.C.E.), or of the early Republic, the ‘conflict of the orders’ and the conquest of Italy (up until the mid-3rd century B.C.E.), or of the wars of conquest against the Carthaginians and the Macedonians (concluding with the brutal destruction of Corinth in 146 B.C.E.), or of the social conflict and political breakdown of the last years of the Republic (the so-called ‘Roman Revolution’ of the last century B.C.E.), or of the foundation of imperial rule from Augustus to the Antonines (31 B.C.E. to C.E. 191), or of the High Empire and the rise of Christianity from Septimius Severus to Constantine (C.E. 193-337), or of the division of the Graeco-Roman world into East and West, of the replacement of the imperial office by the kings of Italy, and the rise of the Byzantine world since the foundation of Constantinople (which takes us to the rule of Justinian in the mid-6th century C.E.) - no matter what period of Rome’s ‘thousand-year reign’ we choose to interrogate, the evidence available to us offers a picture of a vigorous independent community developing its own hellenising culture, and taking a full and direct part in the circulation of goods, people and ideas that transformed the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean under Roman rule The spread of this cultural koine through contacts, exchange and competition among Greek, orientalising and native Italic social units could not help but disseminate the kinds of sexual discourse regarding women already considered. The remainder of our course will seek to identify key areas of intersection regarding ancient sexuality, sexual asymmetry and gender consciousness among the manifold polities of this diffuse Graeco-Roman cultural continuum. We might, for example, consider sexuality, gender and body history in light of extant evidence from ancient Israelite, Judaistic and early Christian sources, isolate and scrutinize cultural assumptions regarding prostitution in the milieu of post-Augustan Roman Italy, probe the barriers and concealments set up in the programmatic historical discourse of a quintessential Roman literary source (Tacitus’s Annals of the 1st century C.E. Julio-Claudian dynasty), investigate the “secret history’ of the Late Imperial court of Justinian and Theodora, or explore the spiritual and ascetic renunciation of sexuality in the canons of Classical and Christian intellectual thought. Sexuality, Gender, and Body History in the Ancient Mediterranean SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Reference in bold face are recommended as either useful introductions to important aspects of the field of ancient sexuality, gender, and body history, or as handy collections of relevant source material. M. B. Arthur, "Early Greece: The Origins of the Western Attitude Toward Women," in Women in the Ancient World. The Arethusa Papers edited by J. Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan (1984) 7-58 M. Beard and J. Henderson, "With this Body I Thee Worship: Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity," Gender and History 9.3 (1997) 480-503 B. Berggren and N. Marinatos, Greece and Gender. Papers from the Norwegian Institute at Athens (1995) J. Blok, "Sexual Asymmetry: A Historiographical Essay," in Sexual Asymmetry. Studies in Ancient Society edited by J. Blok and P. Mason (1987) 1-58 S. Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1995) S. Blundell, Women in Classical Athens, London: Bristol Classical Press (1998) J. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago (1980) Luc Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, translated from the French by Janet Lloyd, Berkeley: University of California Press (2002) M. Brosius, Women in Ancient Persia, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1996) Shelby Brown, "'Ways of Seeing' Women in Antiquity: An Introduction to Feminism in Classical Archaeology and Ancient Art History," in Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology edited by Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons, London: Routledge (1997) V. L. Bullough, B. Shelton and S. Slavin, The Subordinated Sex. A History of Attitudes Toward Women (1988) 1-112 E. Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters: the Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, Baltimore (1987) P. Cartledge, "Engendering History: Men v. Women," in The Greeks. A Portrait of Self and Others, Oxford (1993) G. Clark, "Women in the Ancient World," Greece & Rome. New Surveys in the Classics no. 21 (1989) G. Clark, Women in Late Antiquity. Pagan and Christian Lifestyles, Oxford (1993) J. R. Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking in Roman Art: Constructions of Sexuality 100 B.C. to A.D. 250, Berkeley: University of California Press (1998) P. Culham, "Ten Years After Pomeroy: Studies of the Image and Reality of Women in Antiquity," Helios 13 (1986) 9-30 C. Dean, "The Productive Hypothesis: Foucault, Gender, and the History of Sexuality," History and Theory 33 no. 3 (1994) 271ff. K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality: Harvard University Press (1978) P. duBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women, Chicago (1988) E. Fantham, H. P. Foley, N. B. Kampen, S. B. Pomeroy and H. A. Shapiro, Women in the Classical World, Oxford (1994) H. P. Foley, Reflections of Women in Antitquity, New York (1981) L. Foxhall, "Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality," in Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies edited by A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne, London: Routledge (1994) L. Gallo, "La donna greca e la marginalità," Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica 18 (1984) 7-51 Gimbutas, Marija, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 7000-3500 B.C.. Myths, Legends and Cult Images, London: Thames and Hudson (1974) A. W. Gomme, "The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries," Classical Philology 20 (1925) 1-25 J. Gould, "Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens," Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980) 38-59 M. Grant and R. Kitzinger, Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, New York: Scribner's (1988) E. Greene, Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, Berkeley: University of California Press (1997) J. P. Hallett, "Heeding our Native Informants: The Uses of Latin Literary Texts in Recovering Elite Roman Attitudes toward Age, Gender and Social Status," Echos du monde classique 11 no. 3 (1992) 333-355 J. P. Hallett, "Feminist Theory, Historical Periods, Literary Canons, and the Study of Greco-Roman Antiquity," in Feminist Theory and the Classics edited by N. S. Rabinowitz and A. Richlin 44-74 D. M. Halperin, One Hundred Years Of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love, New York and London: Routledge (1990) D. M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, Chicago (2002) T. K. Hubbard, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome. A Sourcebook of Basic Documents, Berkeley: University of California Press (2003) R. Hawley and B. Levick, Women in Antiquity: New Assessments: Routledge (1995) N. Kampen (ed.), Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, Cambridge (1996) Marilyn A. Katz, "Women, Children and Men," in The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998) 100-138 (chapter 5) D. Konstan, "Introduction: Documenting Gender: Women and Men in Non-Literary Classical Texts," Helios 19 (1992) M. Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch. Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Theology in Late Antiquity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2001) T. Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, MA (1989)  D. H. J. Larmour, P. A, Miller and C. Platter, Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1997) M. R. Lefkowitz and M. B. Fant, Women's Life in Greece and Rome. A Source Book in Translation (2nd. ed), Baltimore (2005) G. Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature (in three volumes), University of California (1973-1980) N. Loraux, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes, Princeton (1993) N. Loraux, The Experiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man, Princeton (1995) D. B. Martin, "The Construction of the Ancient Family: Methodological Considerations," Journal of Roman Studies 86 (1996) 40-60 L. McClure, Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World, Blackwell (2002) B. F. McManus, Classics and Feminism: Gendering the Classics, New York: Twayne (1997) D. Montserrat, Sex and society in Graeco-Roman Egypt, London: Kegan Paul (1996) I. Morris, "Archaeology and Gender Ideologies in Early Archaic Greece (in Presidential Panel 1998, Washington, D.C.)," Transactions of the American Philological Association 129 (1999) 305-317 Daniel Ogden, Polygamy, Prostitutes and Death: The Hellenistic Dynasties, London: Duckworth, with The Classical Press of Wales (1999) S. Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?," in Women, Culture, and Society edited by M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (1974) 67-88 P. S. Pantel, "From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints," in A History of Women in the West 1: Belknap Press (1992) S. Pembroke, "Women in charge: the function of alternatives in early Greek tradition and the ancient idea of matriarchy," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967) 1-35 S. B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, New York (1975)  S. B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt: from Alexander to Cleopatra, New York: Schocken Books (1984) S. B. Pomeroy, Women's History and Ancient History, Chapel Hill: University of N. Carolina Press (1991) S. B. Pomeroy, "The Study of Women in Antiquity: Past, Present, and Future," American Journal of Philology 112.2 (1991) 263-268 N. S. Rabinowitz and L. Auanger, Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World: University of Texas Press (2002) B. Rawson, "From `Daily Life' to `Demography'," in Women in Antiquity: New Assessments edited by R. Hawley and B. Levick: Routledge (1995) E. D. Reeder, Pandora: Women in Classical Greece, Princeton (1996)  A. Richlin, "The Ethnographer's Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age," in Feminist Theory and the Classics edited by N. S. Rabinowitz and A. Richlin: Routledge (1993) 272-304 A. Richlin, "Not before homosexuality: the materiality of the cinaedus and the Roman law against love between men," Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1993) 41-54 K. M. Ringrose, The Perfect Servant. Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2003) G. Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt, London (1993) P. W. Rose, "The Case for Not Ignoring Marx in the Study of Women in Antiquity," in Feminist Theory and the Classics edited by N. S. Rabinowitz and A. Richlin J. Rowlandson, (ed.), Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt: A Sourcebook, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998) W. Scheidel, "The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome: Rural Labour and Women's Life in the Ancient World," Greece & Rome 42 no. 2 (1995) 202-217 W. Scheidel, "The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome: Rural Labour and Women's Life in the Ancient World (2)," Greece & Rome 43 no. 1 (1996) 1-10 C. N. Seremetakis, Ritual, power and the body: historical perspectives on the representation of Greek women, New York: Pella (1993) A. Sharrock, "Re(ge)ndering Gender(ed) Studies," Gender and History 9.3 (1997) 603-614 M. Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, Blackwell (2005) H. Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1995) E. Stehle, Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1997 C. G. Thomas "Matriarchy in Early Greece: the Bronze and Dark Ages," Arethusa 6:2 (1973) 173-95 P. Walcot and I. Mcauslan, Women in Antiquity, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1995) C. A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality. Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, Oxford (1999) M. Williamson, Sappho's Immortal Daughters, Boston: Harvard University Press (1995) M. Wyke, Parchments of gender: deciphering the bodies of antiquity, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1998) John G. Younger, "Gender and Sexuality on the Internet," Gender and History 9.3 (1997) 630-634 J. P. Zinsser, "Technology and History: The Women's Perspective," World History Bulletin 12 (1996) 6-9 Of Special Interest Journal of the History of Sexuality Diotima. Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World http://www.stoa.org/diotima/ PAGE 25