Rufius the Cinaedus Exegesis Title: the 'Pivot of Authenticity'

THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Novel Title: Rufius the Cinaedus Exegesis Title: The ‘Pivot of Authenticity’: Representing Ancient Roman Sexuality in Fiction being a Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of PhD in the University of Hull by Sarah Walton, BA, MA (April 2014) Abstract The thesis includes a novel, Rufius the Cinaedus, and an exegesis, The ‘Pivot of Authenticity’: Representing Ancient Roman Sexuality in Fiction, which explores how I creatively engaged with the historical sources to write Rufius the Cinaedus, and the different approaches taken by novelists when writing ancient Rome. Rufius the Cinaedus is a love story between Aeson, a street kid and his mentor, Rufius set in fourth century Alexandria, a period of religious revolution. Plucked from the red-light district, Aeson is groomed for the academy – and as Rufius’ lover. The novel aims to demonstrate the ancient Roman sexual paradigm and explores gender identity, childhood, comradeship and the heroism of ordinary people in a time of turmoil. The exegesis explores the tension that exists between authentically representing the sexuality of ancient Roman characters, and making them engaging for a modern audience. This raises the question: to what extent is historical authenticity desirable? Modern novels of ancient Rome are displaced in terms of time, language and authorship – which necessitates a degree of anachronism. Novelists must decide where to position the ‘pivot of authenticity’: the relationship between the author’s aim with respect to historical authenticity and the reception of the reader. To bridge the gap in time, novelists shift the ‘pivot’, often overlaying modern morals and sexual norms on to the ancient Romans. Authors have been interviewed about their approach to writing historical fiction to validate their process. The original contribution is the ‘pivot of authenticity’, which developed as a composition tool to assist the aim of historical plausibility in Rufius the Cinaedus. The phrase also adds to the discourse of literary theory on the historical novel, and can be used as a tool to evaluate a novel’s relationship with history. i THESIS Rufius the Cinaedus & ‘The Pivot of Authenticity’: Representing Ancient Roman Sexuality in Fiction Contents Novel – Rufius the Cinaedus 1 Exegesis – ‘The Pivot of Authenticity’: 472 Representing Ancient Roman Sexuality in Fiction Introduction 473 1. The Pivot of Authenticity 479 2. The Historical Novel and Anachronism 483 3. Fiction, History and Truth 487 4. Tense & Voice 493 5. Representing Sexuality in the modern fiction of Ancient Rome 497 6. Rendering a cinaedus for a modern readership 515 7. Developing the Pederastic Relationship 521 8. Historical Context and Plausibility 526 9. The ‘Pivot of Authenticity’ in Rufius the Cinaedus 535 Bibliography 538 Acknowledgements ii Rufius the Cinaedus Sarah Walton 1 for Martin, my mentor 2 Author’s Note It was January 2004, and the atmosphere in the Oriental Reading Room at the British Library was an airless hush. Librarians are the same everywhere, handling ancient manuscripts like fragile Venetian glass, although this reading room always felt more tightly stocked with the mysterious words and thoughts of long-forgotten peoples and places. I usually enjoyed the bookish silence, working in that small, windowless room more than the Moscow Library of Foreign Literature, but today I wanted to be able to make some noise without attracting icy looks. ‘Aoi, aoi, aoi,’ I whispered, guessing at the ancient pronunciation of the Coptic: Egyptian written in Greek letters. Black ink turned sepia from age on ivory parchment so thin in places some pages of the codex were translucent. The Pistis Sophia, shelf- marked MS.Add.5114, was copied in Hellenistic Egypt. That much we know. Gnostic Christians used anagrams and passwords to open the doors to the Kingdom of God, but these sets of vowels were meaningless. No scholar has managed to translate them. What made the Director of the Moscow Library think I could decode them? It was probably copied at The Great Library of Alexandria. Experts date it to the fourth century A.D., a time of religious conflict, when writings like this would have been condemned to the book pyres for being heretical. Two scribes must have shared the work. One hand is an elegant script, the other a shaky scribble – perhaps an old man with dexterity problems – or a young scribe learning to write? ‘Aoi, aoi, aoi,’ I mumbled under my breath. As I repeated the words, like a mantra, a strange floaty, hypnotic feeling came over me, and my vision blurred as if I was trapped in the gradual and inevitable loss of consciousness after an anaesthetic. Was the ivory parchment fading, losing its solidity like a desert mirage … or was I falling asleep? No, I wasn’t sleepy; I was wide-awake, but the room had taken on a peculiar light … I was still in a library, but sunlight fell through windows at the top of the room, and not the cold grey of a London January, but the turquoise sky of a Mediterranean summer. Is that a palm tree in a pot by the door? And where did all those scrolls come from … and why’s thick smoke hugging the high corners of the room? And that smell of burning …? ‘By Bacchus, take the book and run, dear.’ The urgent lisp sucked me into my waking vision. I was in a scriptorium. Like a fly on the wall, I watched the scene unfold. 3 The voice belonged to a fat old Roman librarian in a toga and thick make up. He was impatient for a boy to take a codex and escape to safety. A strange feeling of knowing flooded through me like I was a Greek god looking down from Olympus, as if I had some uncanny part to play in this drama. Their lives were in danger; a sense of impending doom, of time running out squeezed the air from my lungs so that I too held my breath and tried not to inhale the smoke. But panic was not the most powerful emotion in the scriptorium. The room was full of love. Love for the books, and love for the boy and a burning need to protect them both. There was an unnatural age gap between them, but the quality of this love was undoubtedly erotic. In the same way that the smoke had made me cough, the love between the librarian and the young scribe sent a sensation to my groin: a delicate, high twang of cymbals. As quickly as the vision appeared, it dissolved and again I found myself in the stillness of the Oriental Reading Room, the Pistis Sophia in front of me. Confused, I swung my head to the information desk. The librarians were absorbed in their quiet tasks as they had been just moments before. Nothing had changed, except the quick thud in my chest, a hoarse catch in my throat like I’d just smoked a pack of twenty Marlboro, a jaded feeling similar to jetlag as if I’d travelled a vast distance at great speed, and a voice. Somehow the Roman’s dramatic lisp had followed me back into the twenty-first century. ‘Tell my story, dear. Tell the story of the cinaedus.’ For years I tried to ignore the voice, but it was insistent. It stalked me, crept up on me when I least expected it – in the bathroom, ‘Oooo, you’re a bit light on the kohl, dear. Less plucking, more painting of the eyebrows!’; out with my work colleagues, ‘Oh, what a dull bunch of bookworms, dear. Top up the wine – Bacchus will slap a smile on their dreary faces,’ and in the bedroom … but we won’t go there just yet. The library was where he hounded me most. I was meant to be translating a mysterious Coptic manuscript, and the librarian kept driving me to the dirty poems of Martial, Catullus and Juvenal. Cinaedus, the word cropped up everywhere, but what did it mean? My knowledge of the Roman world didn’t extend far beyond schoolgirl Latin, Gladiator and Carry On Cleo. I was a Hellenic scholar. Latin wasn’t my area, but I guessed it must have come from kinaidos, the Greek word for an effeminate buggeree. My hunch was correct. A cinaedus was an adult male who dressed effeminately, wore 4 make up and the Latin insult implied that he was the receptive partner. That’s academic speak for taking it up the arse. Prepare to have your modern glasses whipped off and replaced by the very different rules, attitudes and sexual identities of our ancient Romans ancestors. We will enter a world where you define your sexuality not on a spectrum with gay at one end and straight at the other, but whether you conquer, or submit. And for the Romans, if you were a rich adult man, you were expected to conquer and penetrate. It was a social outrage to deviate from the hard ideal of Roman masculinity, wear make-up and bend over for your pleasure. On the other hand, it was perfectly acceptable for boys to submit to older men. Shocking, morally wrong through the lens of our social eyewear, but ancient Romans would not have fluttered an eyelash. They would however have been scandalised if the older man was doing the bending. So there I was with a cinaedus lisping laviscious scandal in one ear, and this mantra, ‘Aoi, aoi, aoi,’ perplexing me in the other. Why, in the name of Bacchus, would a cinaedus, devoted only to the god of pleasure and a good time, be desperate to save an ancient Christian Gnostic manuscript? And how did it end up in the British Library nearly 2000 years later? 5 You sleep with big-dicked boys, Phoebus, and what is erect on them is not erect on you.

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