Cultural Impact of Classical Greek Homoeroticism - Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome

See also: Homosexuality in ancient Rome and Sexuality in ancient Rome

The Hellenization of elite culture as a kind of luxury import influenced sexual attitudes among "avant-garde, philhellenic Romans." The prestige of Greek literature and art made homoeroticism seem urbane and sophisticated. There were fears, however, that Greek models might affect behavior and corrupt traditional Roman social codes (the mos maiorum). A vaguely documented law that was passed during this period of Hellenization attempted to regulate aspects of homosexual relationships between freeborn males, perhaps to protect Roman youth from older men emulating Greek customs of pederasty. Homosexual behaviors at Rome were acceptable only within an inherently unequal relationship; male Roman citizens retained their masculinity as long as they took the active, penetrating role, and the appropriate male sexual partner was a prostitute or slave, who would nearly always be non-Roman. Effeminacy or a lack of discipline in managing one's sexual attraction to another male threatened a man's "Romanness" and thus might be disparaged as "Eastern" or "Greek." Attacks on emperors such as Nero and Elagabalus, whose young male partners accompanied them in public for official ceremonies, criticized the perceived "Greekness" of male-male sexuality.

By the close of the 2nd century BC, however, the consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus was among a circle of poets who made short, light Hellenistic poems fashionable in the late Republic. One of his few surviving fragments is a poem of desire addressed to a male with a Greek name, signaling a new aesthetic in Roman culture. The Hellenizing of Latin literature in the "new poetry" came to fruition in the 50s BC with Gaius Valerius Catullus, whose poems, written in forms adapted from Greek meters, include several expressing desire for a freeborn youth explicitly named "Youth" (Iuventius). His Latin name and free-born status subvert pederastic tradition at Rome. Catullus, however, more often addresses his poems to a woman, and while the theme of boy-love is found in his successors writing during the reign of Augustus, by the end of the Augustan period Ovid, Rome's leading literary figure, declares the fashion dead: making love with a woman is more enjoyable, he says, because unlike pederastic sex it's mutual.

The Hellenization of Roman culture occurred in large part as a result of the Roman conquest of Greece. Roman attitudes toward Greek culture were thus ambivalent: while it was admired as superior in the arts and intellectual pursuits, Roman superiority was asserted in matters of morality, and sometimes simply asserted. In Archaic and classical Greece, paiderasteia had been a formal social relationship between freeborn males; taken out of context, and imported into Rome as the luxury product of a conquered people, pederasty came to express roles based on domination and exploitation. The reception of Greek pederasty at Rome thus had a dual character, reflected on the piece of convivial silver known as the Warren Cup. It has been argued that the two sides of this cup represent the two pederastic traditions at Rome, the Greek in contrast to the Roman (though the cup may be a modern forgery).

In his work on Roman homosexuality, the classicist Craig A. Williams has emphasized that the Romans themselves did not regard male-male sexual behaviors as foreign, and argues that pederasty itself was not imported. What was foreign to the Romans was the Greek custom of pederasteia in which both participants were free citizens. "Those sexual practices that could be represented as somehow 'Greek'," Williams notes, "were primarily those involving freeborn boys openly courted in accordance with the Hellenic traditions of pederasty." Williams regards the use of slaves as a characteristic that distinguishes Roman pederasty, but asserts that other scholars are in error when they view the Hellenization of Roman culture as having influenced Roman sexual attitudes, though he concedes that the Romans had a concept of "Greek customs which included a homosexual component." Williams also disagrees with other scholars who take Latin expressions such as praegraecari ("to Greek it up") as necessarily illustrating the perceived "Greekness" of certain behaviors. Williams treats the phrase "Greek love" itself as a modern misconception, and his purpose is to describe male-male relations in Rome as a reality. "Greek love," or the cultural model of Greek pederasty in ancient Rome, may be distinguished from homosexual practice as a "topos or literary game" that "never stops being Greek in the Roman imagination."