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Masculinities in the Ancient Greco-Roman World

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Masculinities in the Ancient Greco-Roman World Chapter 2 Masculinities in the Ancient Greco-Roman World Introduction In this chapter, I study the masculinities of the ancient Greco-Roman world. My aim is not to provide a comprehensive analysis, but to offer guidelines that will help to compare the ideal masculinities in the Synoptic Gospels with the ideals existing in the ancient Greco-Roman world. In the previous chapter, I suggested that there may be several ideals competing for the hegemonic posi- tion in any given culture. What were the hegemonic masculinities like in the ancient Greco-Roman world? This chapter employs a diachronic approach. I use a wide range of sources, ranging over several centuries,1 to show the prevalence of some ideals and change in others, as well as the enduring competition between different ideals. Nevertheless, most of the information comes from writings by the elite, espe- cially philosophical texts. We cannot be sure if the masculinities presented in these writings were the hegemonic masculinities. For example, the philosophi- cal ideals were not necessarily hegemonic or widespread. Philosophers in gen- eral were not the normative voice of the culture.2 In any case, I suggest that the ideals presented in this chapter were at least competing for the hegemonic position. The philosophical texts also offer the most material on the ethics and ideals of the ancient Greco-Roman people. One of the philosophical schools to which I often refer in this chapter is the Stoic school, which was the dominant philosophical movement of the first two centuries CE.3 It was thus contempo- rary with the writing of the Synoptic Gospels. My main thesis in this chapter is that there were at least two competing ideals of masculinity in the ancient Greco-Roman world, one emphasizing 1 Most of these sources are philosophical treatises, although I do refer to drama and poetry, for example. The reason is that philosophical writings explicitly discuss what masculinity is and how ideal men are supposed to behave. In terms of genre, narrative texts such as ancient novels are closer to the Synoptic Gospels, but they are also too similar in a way, since neither explicitly discusses masculinity. Comparing ancient novels with the Synoptic Gospels would require the external perspective provided by the Greco-Roman philosophical writings. 2 See, e.g., Plato, Resp. 489a, where Socrates mentions the marginalization of the philosophers in Athens. See also Winkler 1990, 172; Hobbs 2000, 202; Langlands 2006, 13. 3 Russell 2001, 63; George 2009, 81. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004361096_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Susanna Asikainen - 9789004361096 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:29:07PM via free access 20 Chapter 2 control over others and the other emphasizing self-control. I will also argue that being born a man was not enough to make a man masculine in the ancient Greco-Roman world. It was possible for a man to be labeled effeminate, and I will examine the reasons that made a man effeminate. To end the chapter, I will briefly study early Jewish masculinities as examples of marginalized mas- culinities. This analysis further complicates the picture of the ideal masculini- ties in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Biological Sex in the Ancient Greco-Roman World In Chapter 1, it was noted that being born male is not enough to make one mas- culine. Was this also the case in the ancient Greco-Roman world? The ancient Greco-Roman understanding of biological sex was vastly different from the modern one. In the Greco-Roman medical and philosophical texts, the female and male reproductive organs were thought to be essentially the same. Males and females had the same sexual organs, but they were in different places. The male body was seen as the normative, standard, and perfect human body. The female body was thought to lack the vital heat that made the male body per- fect. This is why the female reproductive organs were an inverted—and hence, imperfect—version of the normative male genitals.4 This view was held, for example, by Galen and Soranus of Ephesus.5 Galen argues: All the parts, then, that men have, woman have too, the difference be- tween them lying in only one thing, which must be kept in mind through- out the discussion, namely, that in women the parts are within [the body], whereas in men they are outside, in the region called the perineum.6 Thomas Laqueur calls this the one-sex model. He points out that there were not two distinct sexes that were considered the opposite of each other, but 4 Laqueur 1990, 4–6. 5 Soranus, Gynecology 1.9; 1.16; 1.33. Laqueur 1990, 10, 26, 62. Aristotle argues that the womb is peculiar to the female and the penis is distinctive of the male. Aristotle, Hist. an. 493a25–27. Nevertheless, in Hist. an. 493b, Aristotle says: “The privy part of the female is opposite in structure to that of the male: the part below the pubes is receding, and does not protrude as in the male.” Transl. A. L. Peck. Aristotle also uses the same word, αἰδοῖον, to describe the male and female genitalia. 6 Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body 14.6–7, in Lefkowitz & Fant (ed.) 2005, 243– 246. Transl. M. T. May. Susanna Asikainen - 9789004361096 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:29:07PM via free access Masculinities in the Ancient Greco-Roman World 21 rather “delicate, difficult-to-read shadings of one sex.”7 Females and males were not considered opposite sexes, but more perfect or less perfect versions of the male body. Sex, in other words, was considered a sliding scale or a continuum with the perfect male on one end and the imperfect female on the other. Males were the fetuses who had reached their full potential.8 It was believed that the sex of the fetus was determined either by its place in the uterus, by the temperature of the womb, or by the strength of the seed.9 Since sex was determined by such vague and indefinite factors, biological sex was problem- atic: there was always the danger of a confusion of sexes. What made the sex even more problematic was its instability. Even after birth, the sex was not im- mutable. Reports of sex changes are common in ancient Greco-Roman litera- ture.10 Pliny the Elder, after talking about hermaphrodites,11 discusses women who have changed into men. He even mentions himself seeing a person whose sex had changed. Women changing into men is no fantasy. We find in the Annals that dur- ing the consulship of P. Licinius Crassus and C. Cassius Longinus a girl liv- ing with her parents in Casinum changed into a boy and was transported to a barren island at the command of the soothsayers. Licinius Mucianus has recorded that he actually saw at Argos a man called Arescon who had been given the name Arescusa at birth and had even married a husband, but then grew a beard, developed male attributes, and took a wife. He also records seeing a boy at Smyrna who had experienced the same sex change. I myself saw in Africa one L. Consitius, a citizen of Thysdrus who 7 Laqueur 1990, 52. 8 Brown 1988, 9–10. 9 For example, Parmenides argued that females develop on the left side of the womb and males on the right. Empedocles maintained that males need a hot womb to develop, while a cold womb produces females. In Hippocratic writings, it is argued that the strength and quantity of sperm determines the sex. If both partners produce strong sperm, a male is born, but weak sperm results in a female. If one partner produces strong and the other weak sperm, the sex of the fetus is determined by the quantity of the sperm. See Laqueur 1990, 39; Allen 1985, 25–35. 10 For examples, see Ovid, Metam. 3.316–338 (Tiresias); 4.279–280 (Sithon); 4.285–388 (Hermaphroditus); 8.843–878 (Mestra); 9.666–797 (Iphis); 12.169–209 (Cainis). See also Brisson 2002, 35–44. 11 Pliny the Elder, Nat. 7.3.34: “People are also born participating in both sexes at once. We call them hermaphrodites, and, though they were once called androgyni and regarded as portents, they are now regarded as pets.” Transl. Beagon 2005, 66. Susanna Asikainen - 9789004361096 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:29:07PM via free access 22 Chapter 2 had turned into a man on his wedding day [and who was still alive at the time of writing].12 The sex changes mentioned by ancient writers are usually from female to male. Since the female reproductive organs were believed to be an inverted version of male genitals, they could protrude from the body if the body became more male-like; in other words, if body heat increased. The female sex was also seen as less stable. Since nature tended toward more perfect—that is, male—the sex changes were female to male.13 The change needed not be as drastic as an actual sex change. There were stories of men who had become physical- ly effeminate. A man could also lose his heat, making him more effeminate.14 A Hippocratian treatise claims that Scythian men’s inactive lifestyles made them more like women.15 Thus, there could be masculine women and effemi- nate men. In order to be masculine, a man had to actively strive to extirpate traces of softness.16 As we have seen, it was possible to be somewhere in between the male and female poles of the sex continuum and to change one’s sex.
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