Roman Homosexuality: Second Edition

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The Concept of Stuprum 4.

Effeminacy and Masculinity 5. Williams combines lucid analysis of the protocols governing male sexual behavior in ancient Rome with comprehensive documentation from literary sources It is a landmark work of scholarship and should prove accessible to scholars of all disciplines.

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Ebook This title is available as an ebook. To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider. First of all, I do not understand why the "penetrative paradigm" has been foisted on Michel Foucault to the degree it has, to the point that Williams and others term it as "Foucauldian" or "Foucaultian" Secondly, while not altogether discarding the "penetrative paradigm," I would certainly challenge its absolute pre-eminence also in Roman sexual culture.

In the large majority of the surviving discourses of Roman homo sexuality, whether in poetry and prose, even in some graffiti and in many of the material representations of love-making, the ultimate paradigm for sexual intimacy is what I would call the "unitive" one.

With few exceptions cf. It is the literature of erotic desire and longing, not of accomplished or to-be-accomplished sexual acts. Williams indeed recognizes the importance of "the distinction between sexual acts and sexual acts," admitting that it is "perhaps not been sufficiently emphasized" in Roman Homosexuality. The desire for closeness with the beloved boy also informs the homoerotic poetry of Catullus, Horace, Tibullus, and Martial, as well as Petronius' Satyricon.

Roman Homosexuality

These, too, are almost completely the literature of desire and longing, as in the lover's kissing his beloved or his longing to do so Catullus 47, 99 and Martial 3. The sumptuous, even celebratory depiction of male-male copulation on the famous Warren Cup discussed by Williams on pp.

Incongruously perhaps, it is in the well-known attack on romantic amor in Lucretius 4. Only in literary and sub-literary texts and in material representations which are blatantly dominated by satirical or scatological motives or by phallic self- aggrandizement, or by both, can one speak of anything like an ubiquitous penetrative paradigm with its connotations of aggression and subjugation. It should be clear, therefore, that I regard the "penetrative paradigm" as a too restrictive framing of the gender-appropriate sexual roles supposedly conceptualized and valorized by Roman men.

Indeed, Williams's comprehensive and perceptive typology of the notorious cinaedus , the supreme anti-masculine scare-figure in Roman literature and material representations—who in no way, as Williams well argues in more than one place, must be equated with the so-called "pathic" or "passive homosexual" a very misleading term, anyway: In her Foreword, Martha Nussbaum expresses her expectation "that in a larger enquiry this book's emphasis on power relations would be enlarged and complicated by reflection on how Romans thought it was right to treat other people, what they thought about friendship and virtue, and how sex interwove with all these other concerns.

The second edition confirms once more that Williams's book is indeed pioneering in its monumental scope and that no future scholar can afford not to be instructed by it. Like the first, the second edition is attractively produced and I have not come upon any significant typos. However, "Clauss-Slaby's database for Pompeii" mentioned in note 8 on p.

The cover illustration elicited a smile from me. However, Rubens's Ganymede is a strapping, fair-haired young man, more post-adolescent than adolescent, who, I think, does not represent—unlike the cover illustration of a 2nd century bust of Hadrian's Antinous in the first edition— Greco-Roman antiquity's ideal of the pais kalos or puer delicatus but could be the brother of the two voluptuous, blondish young women in Rubens's painting, "The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus by Castor and Pollux.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review Second Edition first published Oxford University Press, Reviewed by Beert Verstraete, Acadia University beert.

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