The Manly Eunuch. Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity

THE MANLY EUNUCH

'IHE CIDCAGO SElUES ON SEXUALITY, IDSIORY, AND SOCIETY

Edited by ]ohn C. Fout ALSO IN 'IHE SERIES:

Improper Advances: Rnpe andHeterosexual Gonflictin Ontario, 1880-1929 by Karen Dubinsky A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial IGllings ofDr. Thomas Neill Cream by Angus McLacen · The Language ofSex: Five Voices fromNorthern France around 1200 by John W Baldwin Crossingwer the Line: Legislating Morality and the MannAct by David J. Langum SexualNature/Sexual Culture edited by Paul R. Abramson and Steven D. Pinketton

Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism by Bernadette J. Brooten Trials ofMasculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930 by Angus McLacen The Invention ofSodomy in Christian Theology by Mark D. Jordan Sites ofDesirejEconomies ofPlearure: Sexualities inAsia and the Paciftc edited by Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly Sex and the Gender &Polution, Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment Lontlon by Randolph Thunbach Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same-Sex Relationsand the YMCA by John Donald Gustav-Wrathall City ofSisterly andBrotherly Lwes: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 by Mare Stein The Politics ofGay llights edited by Craig Rirnmerman, Kenneth Wald, and Clyde Wucox

Otto Weininger Sex, Science, and Selfin Imperial Vienna by Chandak Sengoopta

.··THE MANLY

EUNUCH Masculinity) Gender Ambiguity) and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity

MATHEW KUEFLER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO AND LONDON

MATHEW KUEFLER received bis Ph.D. from Yale University in 1995. He is assistant professor ofhistory at San Diego Stare University and has also raught at Yale and Rice Universities.

The University ofChicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2001 byThe UniversityofChicago All rights reserved. Published 2001 Peinted in the UnitedSrates ofAmerica 12 3 4 5 Hl 0908 0706 05 0403 02 01 ISBN: 0-226-45739-7 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dara Knefler, Mathew. The manly eunuch : masculinity, gender ambiguity, and Christian ideology in late antiquity f Mathew Knefler. p. cm. - (The Chicago series on sexualiry, history, and society) Includes bibliographical references {p. ) and index. ISBN 0-226-45739-7 1. Masculinity-Religious aspecrs-Christianity-History-To 1500. 2. Masculiniry-Rome-Hisrory-To 1500. I. Tide. II. Series. BT702 .K842001 155.3 '32 '0937-dc21 OO-Oll473 @ The paper used in this publication meers the minimum requiremenrs of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence ofPaper for Peinred Library Materials, ANS! Z39 .48-1992.

For]oe and Brian

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

INTRODUCTION

1

Part One-Changing Realities' l

"MASCULINE SPLENDOR"

19

Sexual Difference) Gender Ambiguity) and the Social Utility ofUnmanliness

2

"MEN RECEIVE A WOUND, AND SUBMIT TO A DEFEAT"

37

Masculinity) Militarism) and PoliticalAuthority

3

"A PURITY HE DOES NOT SHOW HIMSELF"

70

Masculinity) the Later &man Household) and Men)s Sexuality

Part 'IIvo-Changing Ideals

4

"I AM A SOLDIER OF CHRIST"

105

Christian Masculinity and Militarism

5

"WE PRIESTS HAVE OUR OWN NOBILITY"

125

ChristianMasculinity and PublicAuthority

6

"MY SEED IS A HUNDRED TIMES MORE FERTILE"

161

ChristianMasculinity) Sex) andMarriage

7

"THE MANLINESS OF FAITH"

206

Sexual Difference and Gender Ambiguity in Latin Christian Ideology

8

"EUNUCHS FOR THE SAKE OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN"

Castration,itnd Christian Manliness

245

viü

CONTENTS

CONCLUSION

283

A NOTE ABOUT THE NOTES

299

ABBREVIATIONS USED

"300

NOTES

'301

BIBLIO GRAPHY

393

INDEX

429

Acknowledgments

There are many individuals and institutions I wjsh to thank for their part in the creation of this book. The first belongs to my family, who has always provided me with loving support. The sec- boys past their prime at that [malthakoi . . . meta · meirakia],~and areslaves to alyre-player and a poor one tooY

Cassius's indictment was dear: the love ofluxury had provoked the crisis by diverting Roman men from the Pita militaris into effeminate enjoyment of wealth. Cassius even placed his denunciation in the mouth of a barbarian woman, whose courage and wisdom shows her to be manlier than her Roman enemies. The speech was as much a comment on contemporary politics as it was a historical depiction, since Rome was ruled in Cassius's day by the emperor Elagabalus, excoriated like N ero for his effeminacy, as we will see below. Again, the reference to "boys past their prirne" irnplies that the Roman men are so unmanly as to be the (passive) sexual partners of other adult men, as we will also see in the next chapter. Not every Roman author was so critical. Vegetius, for example, affered an explanation for the military decline of Rome that tried to circumvent the irnplicit critique ofRoman manliness. The neglect ofmilitary skill among men, he suggested, was because a "sense of security born oflong peace has diverted men partly to the enjoyment of private leisure, partly to civilian careers.''18 The empire had hardly enjoyed "lang peace" in late antiquity, and so his response must be seen as more of a denial than a serious attempt at explanation. Still, Roman writers of the later empire typically only reiterated the masculine military ethic and what was becoming more and more a charade of Roman might in war. More often than not, they sirnply denied the realities of the political status of the empire and repeated the maxim of the ancients on war: men who avoided things military were "betrayers ofliberty" (proditores libertatis) even while they themselves refused military service as demeaning. 19 The denial of the military crisis can best be seen in the panegyrics of the later Roman Empire. The whole purpose of these poetic orations was to praise the emperors as manly heroes. Men often delivered these panegyrics in gratitude for appointments to high public offices, and they can perhaps be excused for their fl.attery. Their orations followed standard literary themes, including the praise of the parentage of the subject of the poem, his upbringing, and his virtues. Chief among the panegyrists' themes was, without fail, the prowess in war exhibited by the man being praised. (Indeed, it has been suggested that the emphasis on the martial accomplishments of the panegyrists' subjects may have been the most po-

42

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litically expedient in an age of usurpers and military coups, when the emperor's parentage and upbringing may not have been overly distin~ guished and was best avoided by the panegyrist:20 ) · Panegyrics of the later empire demoostrate the facade of cori~'imi~.d Roman military strength. A panegyric to .Julian praised at great length for his vita militaris. 21 A panegyric to Honorius, given· when he was only a youth, dwelt also at length on the military upbringing of the emperor, his eagerness for war, and his manly appearance in armor, even managing to compare him with the god Mars, all necessarily without congratulating him for actual participation in war. 22 The last, most ineffectual emperors of the mid-fifth-century West were accorded some of the most elaborate and laudatory panegyrics. In one, the female personification ofRome bemoans her recent military disasters in the presence of Jupiter, who assuresher that he will send her the emperor Avitus (ruled 455-456) for her rescue. 23 In another, the goddess Rome receives the tribute of other personified peoples because ofher new lofty stature under Majorian (ruled 457-461), a warrior since childhood. 24 In a third, the numerous gods and goddesses of the pagan pantheon vow to send a savior in the person of the new emperor Anthemius (ruled 467-472) to the personified empire to deliver her from her military troubles. 25 Fifthcentury, panegyrics attest both to the heights of unrealistic flattery to which poets were willing to climb in their praise of imperial virtues and to their willingness to deny the realities of the military state of affairs in theempire. The emphasis among men on the honor and dignity of the vita militaris also required the utter disregard for contemporary accounts about how war was actually conducted. The same writers who demonstrated great admiration for the soldier's life repeatedly condemned armies for debauchery and lade of discipline. Ammianus Marcellinus, describing the wintering ofJulian's army at Antioch, noted critically the

rum

intemperate habits of the troops, who were gorged with meat and demoralized by a craving for drinlc, so that almost every day some of them were carried through the streets to their quarters on the shoulders of passersby after debauches in the temples which called for punishment rather than indulgence. Conspicuous in this respect were the [legions known as the] Petulantes and the Celts, whose indiscipline at this tinle passed all bounds. 26

According to theHistoriaAugusta> the future emperor Severus Alexander complained that his soldiers stationed in Gaul "go straggling on all sides; the tribunes bathe in the middle of the day; they have cook-shops for

"MEN RECEIVE A WO UND, AND SUBMIT TO A DEFEAT"

43

mess-halls and, instead ofbarracks, brothels; they dance, they drink, they sing,. and they regard as the proper limit to a banquet unlimited drinking,"27 Ernperars occasionally crucified soldiers to discourage theft from the local p()pülace and had hands cut off recaptured deserters, suggesting ·that both offences wer:e commonplace occurrences needing severe punishments as disincentives. 28 .Praise of the soldier's life also necessitated ignoring the high rates of desertion in the later Roman army. Same desertion must only have been expected: the continually sinlcing defense against the barbarian invaders must have disheartened even the bravest of the imperial troops. Before a decisive battle in Britain in 368, the_general Theodosius invited all soldiers who had fled because of the ferocity of the barbarians to return with impunity. Many were said to have accepted this offer, which suggests that many had previously deserted. 29 Later Roman emperors were much harsher to deserters, but the situation had by then deteriorated significantly. Almost a century later, for example, Valentinian ITI (ruled 425455) issued fines against anyone who hid an army deserter or who obstructed inquiries into desertion. 30 Military deserters could be punished in a variety of ways, including "reprimand, money fine, imposition of duties, change of branch of the service, reduction in military ranlc, dishonorable discharge:' or even death. 31 Men temporarily absent without leave were treated more leniently than were deserters if they returned voluntarily and if it could be determined that they had left for understandable reasons: this leniency may indicate that such unofficialleaves were a regular occurrence. 32 The problern of desertion may help to explain the increasing reliance of the Roman army on German mercenary troops, one of the key factors in the eventual collapse of the western Roman government. In turn, the large numbers ofGermans serving for pay in the Roman army and without realloyalty to the empire may help to explain the increasing problern of soldiers who fled before batdes or defected to the enemy during campaigns. 33 Apparent lack of sustained financial support for soldiers may also explain the frequent defections of mercenary troops. Valentinian Ill, for example, imposed a new tax to help pay for military supplies so that the troops would not have to continue to engage in trading, "which is unworthy and shameful [indfg'na a pudenda] for an armed man:' but without which "they can scarcely be vindicated from the peril of hunger or from the destruction of cold."34 (On this score, the barbarian commander Stilicho was praised for remembering to pay his soldiers intimes of peace as well as in times of war 35 ). Lade of supplies and pay similarly resulted in a mutiny of troops in Gaul in 354, a dangeraus situation that

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was ended only when the leaders of the rebellion were bribed. 36 The numbers of deserters may also have been augmented by the numerous civil wars of the period. When the usurper MaXiruin lost his throne t() · Licinius (ruled 308-324), itwas said ofhis army that'"halflay dea(i, the other half either surrendered or took to flight." 37 Lactantius, ·describillg the last scene, added that "any shame at deserting their err;tperor had beeh removed by his deserting them.:'' 38 The problern of unmanliness was never far from the minds of men, especially in describing desertion from the army and flight from battle. Julian dismissed the fleeing army of the usurper Magnentius, despite their manliness [andreia] in war, as simply "reap[ing] the fruits of his cowardice.:''39 For those men frightened enough to attempt suicide rather than fight in battle, the law proscribed death. 40 Even Vegetius was forced to admit in his military treatise that "few men are born naturally brave; hard work and good training malc.:e them so.:''41 Gi.ven the Roman preoccupation with distinguishing the manly from the unmanly, it is perhaps not surprising that Vegetius feit compelled to add thatwhile it was "a natural reaction in the minds of nearly all men to be fearful as they go to do battle with the enemy:' it was also true that "those whose minds are panicked by [the enemy's] actual appearance are without doubt the wealc.:er sort [infirmiores ].''42 In the same spirit, later Roman law decreed that "whoever was first to flee from the line ofbattle must suffer capital punishment with his fellow soldiers looking on, by way of example.''43 Legislating manliness in war was one method of dealing with cowardice and desertion, especially in a period in which many men were not willing to participate in war (and the harsh punishments accorded deserters in battle by legislators who were themseives unwilling to fight carries a certain irony). The stigma attached to desertion or cowardice in battle also made itselffeit in the legislative attitude toward prisoners ofwar. Prisoners ofwar indicated by their very survival that they had preferred capture to death in battle, and the law was harsh to such men. Jurists suggested that"in every branch of the law, a person who fails to return from enemy hands is regarded as having died at the moment when he was captured.:''44 The penalties enacted against prisoners of war reinforced their legal nonexistence: their wills were no langer valid, and their citizenship was put in jeopardy. While prisoners of war could be recovered through the negotiated exchange of property captured in war (postliminium )J the same was likeiy feit about the return of men as the return of weaponry: "they are received with disgrace.:''45

"MEN RECEIVE A WOUND, AND SUBMIT TO A DEFEAT"

45

MILITARISM AND ESCAPISM

Yet somehow, despite the disasters of the later Roman wars and the de.militarization of the Roman people, the idea of martial manliness and of the "soldier's life" concinued to hold sway. The power of military metaphors· to express the cultural aspiratiöns ofRoman masculinity, even in the last centuries of the Western Empire, may be seen in the rapid spread of the religion ofMithra. Mithra was a Persian god whose worship first appeared in the Mediterranean sometime in the second century c.E. The cult of Mithra especially attracted soldiers in the Roman army, and they likely brought it west with them as they were transferred from one location to another along the borders of the empire. Mithraism was not confined to soldiers, however, and there is evidence for its popularity among the upper classes ofRome, at least from the end of the second century and the reign of Commodus, the first emperor known to have patronized the religion. The emperor Julian was also a devotee and may have sponsored a revival of the cult in the fourth century. In that century, it has been estimated there were more than one hundred temples and shrines to the god in the city ofRome alone, which implies that Mithra's appeal extended weil beyond just soldiers. 46 Part of the appeal provided by the worship of Mithra lay in its militaristic symbols and vocabulary. The genesis legend of the god hirnself involved a primordial battle against the forces of evil, signified by Mithra's salvific slaying of a cosmic bull, a slaying reenacted by believers in a rite known as the taurobolium. 47 Followers considered themselves part of a ''holy army'' (sancta militia) with the god as their "commander'' (dux). The grade of"soldier" (mi/es) was one of the seven stages of initiation and may have involved military-type tests of endurance and sttength; the very idea of ranks of membership formed a parallel with the army. Finally, the complete exclusion of women from the cult of Mithra contributed to this military appearance of the religion and emphasized its masculine character. Through Mithraism, one might soggest, religious devotion could continue to provide a mask of militarism for Roman participants. The martial power of the divinity could be seen as reinforcing the sttength ofhis followers in their daily lives on Earth -lives that may not otherwise have seemed powerful at all. 48 In this way; the aura of a militaristi.c religion supplanted the cultural void left by the declining military effectiveness of the empire. Men of the later Roman Empire also satisfied their desire for military exploits vicariously through their leisure acti.vities, as spectators of martial violence in the gladiatorial contests, wrestling matches, and various

46

CHAPTER TWO

arena games. 49 Roman writers frequendy connected the images of soldier and gladiator, linking the two in the ancient mind. 50 The Romannobility was notoriously addicted to violent sports, gathering in arenas and phitheaters built in most large Roman cities to watch them and spending . exorbitant sums on the contests. 51 · · · The gladiatorial games and other athletic and pugilistic contests were closely linked to issues of manliness and unmanliness. No one was quite sure, however, into which category gladiators should be included. On the one hand, the author of theHistoriaAugusta suggested that manliness was at the very origin of such contests: "when about to go to war the Romans felt it necessary to behold fighting and wounds and steel and nalced men contending among themselves, so that in war they might not fear armed euernies or shudder at wounds and blood?'52 The virtuous man was compared with a gladiator, and .the gladiator's courage, perseverance, discipline, and disregard for pain were admired. Gladiators and athletes were not subject to legal infamy, as were other public performers: "for their object was to display their manliness [virtus]?'53 On the other hand, most Roman intellectuals showed a certain disdain for the bloody sports. The imperial biographies, for example, praised those emperors who attempted to limit the expense and violence of the games, like the revered Marcus Aurelins, and condemned those emperors who sperrt recldessly on the games. 54 The despised Commodus, for example, loved the games and even fought in them himself. "Indeed:' the author of the HistoriaAugusta suggested, "one would have believed him born rather to a life of shameful things [probes] than to the high place to which Fortune advanced him?' 55 · Asthis last comment implied, it may be that the disdain Roman writers evinced for participation in the games had more to do with dass than gender status, since most fighters in the arenas were slaves or lowborn. Cassius Dio repeated the tradition of a previous generation ofhistorians, that during the reign ofNero,

am-:

there was another exhibition that was at once most disgraceful and most shocking, when men and warnen not only of the equestrian but even of the senatorial order appeared as performers in the orchestra, in the Circus, and in the hunting-theatre, lik:e those who are held in lowest esteem. Some of them played the flute and danced in pantomimes or acted in tragedies and comedies or sang to the lyte; they drove horses, killed wild beasts and fought as gladiators, some willingly and some agairrst their will. 56

Severus Alexander was supposed to have believed that "actors and wildbeast hunters and chariot-drivers should be treated as if they were our slaves" and not with the false honor of celebrity. 57 The inferior social sta-

"MEN RECEIVE A WO UND, ,~ND SUBMIT TO A DEFEAT"

47

tus ofthe participants in the gan1es worked to undermine their manliness. (Such evidence also suggests that the rnixture of disdain and admiration for soldiering by men of the upper classes might have been similarly motivated by .dass differences.) . Yet another. aspect of the Roman response to the military crisis is visible in the frequent literary contrasts bet:Ween the supposed manliness of the Romans, as demoristrated by their martial prowess, and the effeminate practices of the cultures and peoples of the East. This was an old theme in Latin literature, based in large patt on the successful historical conquest of those peoples by Rome. The view of the eastern Mediterranean peoples as effeminate may also be found in abundance in the writings oflater Roman authors. Included in the critique of these peoples was a host of negative charges: how their greater wealth, as demonstrated by the richness of their clothing- their use of colared silks, purple dyes, and precious metals and gems-gave them a love ofluxury that was unbecoming and quite the opposite of the Romans' own vita militaris. 58 In a period when Roman writers were themselves questioning the manliness of Roman men, however, this projection of effeminacy onto Bastern peoples took an ironic turn. In many sources, the terms for Easterner and effeminacy were virtually synonymous. Herodes, son of rebel Palmyran Queen Zenobia, was the "most delicate of men, utterly Oriental and of Grecian luxury." 59 Because of the association of effeminacy with the men of the Bastern peoples, Emperor Severus Alexander preferred to be thought of as Roman, even though he was of rnixed parentage, and was said to have been augered when reminded of bis Syrian ancestry. 60 Julian was similarly augered when his troops called him "a degenerate Greek from Asia.'' 61 The soldiers were obviously unaware of the manly character that others thought Julian possessed, but they were responding to the same stereotypes of easterners. Julian hirnself utilized these stereotypes, referring to the "effeminate dispositions" of the Antiochenes and contrasring them with his own hirsute (and manly) self. 62 Roman writers of the later empire linked the effeminacy ofEastern men to the martial defeats of their peoples. Indeed, it had been the weakness of their men's moral characters, Claudian asserted, that had brought to successive ruin the empires of Assyria, Sparta, Persia, and Macedonia. 63 In the final centuries of the Western Empire, however, it was insu:ffi.cient to remind emperors that they might just as easily crush the German barbarians as the Romans had destroyed the lcingdoms of the eastern Mediterranem, as Pacatus did in his panegyric to the emperor Theodosius I (ruled 379-395). 64 Nor was it necessarily good formorale to describe the old Roman victories over the Celts and Carthaginians, as in the

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HistoriaAugusta. 65 The Roman Empire was by that point at the mercy of foreign invaders, barbarians from the north who were proving them~ selves more rnilitaristic and, thus, manlier than th~ Romans. . . .. Again, many Roman writers simply attempted 'to ignore ihe ihie~t posed by the rnilitary successes of the Germans. The numerous treaties ' that the Romans signed with the peoples of the north, in a futile attempt to limit their ravages, were variously described as shrewd political ma:neuvers, peacefully negotiated alternatives to war, or the consequences of shortsighted imperialleadership and were only rarely admitted to be wealc capitulations or practicalities enforced due to lade of financial support for the troops. 66 A description from the HistoriaAugusta represents this see no evil approach: For all Germany, throughout its whole extent, has now been subdued, and nine princes of clifferent tribes have lain suppliant and prostrate.... All booty has been regained, other booty too has beert captured, greater, indeed, than that which was previously taken. The barbarians' oxen now plough the farms of Gaul, the Germans' yoked cattle, now captive, submit their necks to our husbandmen, the fl.ocks of divers tribes are fed for the nourishing of our troops, their herds ofhorses are now bred for the use of our cavalry, and the grain of the barbarians fills our granaries. Why say more? 67

More needed to be said. In the final century of the Western Empire's existence, writers typically described the fear-inspiring character of the barbarian peoples in frightened recognition of their fighting abilities. 68 In a particularly contrived panegyric, for example, Sidonius Apollinaris unconvincingly compared the martial prowess of the emperor Avitus with that of several northern tribes: the Herulian found in you his match in fl.eetness, the Run in javelinthrowing, the Frank in swimming, the Sauromatian in use of shield, the Salian in marching, the Gelonian in wielding the scimitar; and in bearing of wounds you did surpass any mourning barbarian to whom wailing means self-wounding and tearing the cheeks with steel and gauging the red traces of scars on his threatening face. 69

The ferocity of the northern barbarians was unquestioned. As unrealistically as Sidonius described Avitus, he did attribute his rnilitary skill to the training he had received under the commander in chief ofhis empire, the Romangeneral Aetius who had been raised as a hostage of the Huns and had learned from them the arts of war. Without apparently a trace of irony, the panegyrists lay much of the credit for the rnilitary defenses of

"MEN RECEIVE A WOUND, AND SUBMIT TO A DEFEAT"

49

the empire, such as they were, at the feet of these military commanders, often barbarians themselves, men like Stilicho who commanded the western Roman army under the emperor Honorius. 70 . Quite sin1ply, the ·Romans believed the barbarians to be manlier than . . ·they were. ·Even the pinkish skin color of the Germans was evidence of their bravery arid manliness, according to the physiognomists. 71 Sidonius Apollinaris's descriptioh ofTheodoric II, mid-fifth-centU.ry king of the Visigoths, highlighted his ideal masculine physique alongside his manly character: · In his build the will of God and Nature's plan have joined together to endow him with a supreme perfection; and his character is such that even the jealousywhich hedges a sovereign has no power to rob it ofits glories. Take first his appearance. His figure is well-proportioned ... his shoulders are well-shaped, his upper arms sturdy, his forearms hard, his hands broad. The ehest is prominent, the stomach recedes . : . strength reigns in his wellgirt loins. His thigh is hard as hom; the upper legs from joint to joint are full of manly vigor. n

The "manly vigor" of the barbarians, which became more and more apparent as they took gradual control of the Roman Empire, obliged the Romans finally to admit their inability to defend their empire. In their self-examination, the writers of the later empire affered various explanations for the collapse, one of which was, tellingly, a lass of military vigor among the Roman people. Even Ammianus Marcellinus, who had praised Julian's manliness and the brilliance ofhis reign, was forced to recognize that among the best ofJulian's troops were the barbarian mercenaries. He concluded that earlier Romans had been better able to withstand foreign incursions because they had not yet traded their vita militaris for what he called a vita mollitiae (life of effeminacy). 73 An important truth lies beyond the crude ethnic and gendered stereotypes found in the writings of the historians, panegyrists, and physiognomists. Roman writers were attempting to explain historical change according to their traditional opposition of manliness and unmanliness. Their accounts and descriptions all emphasized that historywas repeating itself and that the manly were conquering the unmanly. Men's rejection of the vita militaris and their lass of manliness had cost them the empire. POLITICAL AUTHORITY AND MANLINESS

Participation in politics was as central to Roman men's public identity as was participation in the vita militaris. The holding of political o:ffices and

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resulting placement among the hierarchy of ranlcs.of the Romanelite col-. lectively known as the "course of honors" (cursus honorum) also made . men what they were as men. Indeed, while wcimen's natural sphere:of influence was felt to be the home and domestic affairs, men wete b.~~ lieved equally to be natural rulers of the state and thus of political affairs. N onetheless, the foundations of public authority also underwent significant changes, changes that again brought into question masculine ideals. A number of dassical scholars have discussed the relationship between political authority and elite identity in Roman culture. These scholars have noted how the shifting system of family alliances and family rivalries that had marked politics in the republican era took second place at the start of the empire to a new political strategy of alliance with the imperial family, who dominared politics. In other words, courring imperial favor and appointments became the dominant goal of the efforts of Rome's elite families, turning what had been a competitive aristocracy into an aristocracy of imperial service. The changes to th~ imperial government in the later centuries of the empire, while less well studied, can be seen merely as an intensification of this process, in which more of the balance of public power was removed from the elite dasses and given to the emperor and bis associates. Indeed, the later Roman government virtually exdude(j the old nobility from political power except through imperial service. 74 But few of these scholars have recognized or analyzed the significance of the central role that masculine identity also played in this relationship. 75 Some background information might be helpful here to better appreciate the decline in status of men of the Roman aristocracy within the politicallife of the later empire. To begin, changes in the imperial succession worked largely to exdude aristocratic men from positions of power. The usurpation of the throne by ambitious generals in the third century meant that the imperial throne was controlled by a series ofmilitary rulers who owed their elevation to the army and not to any aristocratic connections. These generals-turned-emperors usually rewarded the army accordingly, preferring to name its officers to influential posts in place of the established senatorial families, who were neglected and demoted from positions of power. Even the restoration of the political order at the end of the third century preduded any significant influence by the nobility in imperial accession. The establishment of a semidynastic system in the fourth century encouraged the reestablishment of a system of promotion through favor and alliance with the imperial family. Finally, by the :fifth century, at least in the western half of the empire, the army commanders known as "masters of the soldiers" (magistri militum ), many of

"MEN RECEIVE A WO UND, AND SUBMIT TO A DEFEAT"

51

whom were barbarians, established a succession ofpuppetemperors under their control.76 All of these political systems worked to exclude the Romannobility from real political power. Sii.nilarly, the later Roman Empire witnessed an increasing emphasis -on the independent authority of the emperors, with a corresponding downplaying of the political suppori: that had brought them to the throne. Diocleti-an (ruled 284-305) and his successors had exaggerated the divine aura of the imperial command and added many of the trappings of eastern Mediterranem rulers to Roman custom. Later emperors robed themselves in purple silk, adorned themselves with gold and jewels, and demanded the prostration of all-even the members of the uppermost nobility-before the sacred imperial presence. Both visual and literary depictions ofimperial rulers show an idealization of rulership and a view of the emperor as the charismatic embodiment of the providential presence in the empire and a symbol of divine favor, whether that divinity was perceived as pagan or Christian. This idealized image of the emperor required ever more elaborate rituals of imperial procession, in which the later Romannobility was obliged to participate. 77 The new ceremonies made the new political realities of aristocratic exclusion increasingly visible to Roman men. The exclusion of the Romannobility from power was never absolute. There were still prestigious public offices held by men of the Roman nobility, who served as consuls, praetors, prefects, and governors. 78 Urban elites continued to exercise considerable local authority in the provinces, and the imperial government still needed to draw from these men to fill its regional representation.79 In a sense, the challenge to the public authority of the aristocracywas met by means of a gradual adaptation to the new political realities, so that the old elites operated wirhin this new system of imperial patronage. In addition, men of the upper classes continued to emphasize exactly those qualities that set them apart from women and from men of the lower classes: their education in literature, philosophy, and rhetoric, and their network of friendships and personal alliances.80 The ranks that defined the later Roman nobility, moreover, were hotly debated, and much was made of the privileges that certain titles and offices conferred. All members of the upper nobility-the senatorial class-were permitted to call themselves clarissimi (the brightest); members ofthe lower nobility-the equestrian class-might only call themselves egregii (the distinguished ). Participation in the imperial service, notably, brought further titles of distinction. Men of the senatorial and equestrian classes who had been provincial governors could call them-

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selves peifectissimi (the most perfect),- but only those who had been praetorian prefects could bear the title eminentissimi (the most eminent)• Members of the aristocracy who had held other maj_or posts coW,d call . themselves illustres (the illustrious) orgloriosi (the glorious); those who. had held minor post were known as sper:tabiles (the brilliant): Bach rank . carried with it various honors and a different social status, An individual's place in this hierarchy also determined his access to the emperor and his position in public ceremonies. 81 · Nonetheless, such elaborate schedules of ranks and titles served also to mask the decline of real authority of such offices, which became largely honorific. Indeed, these positions were becoming less of an honor and more of an obligation because of the many financial responsibilities associated with them, responsibilities that provided a convenient source of income for the state if ati often heavy burden on the individual. Small wonder that many members of the later Roman aristocracy frequently attempted to escape such honors. The unwillingness of the nobility to accept the onus of public expenditures was likely not because of any declining wealth among the later Roman landowning dass. Indeed, the opposite seems to have been the case, as a declining population left lands and monies in fewer hands. Rather, the unwillingness resulted from the fact that the expenditures represented an investment in the political economy in which the nobility no langer shared. 82 The changing nature of the political honors can be seen in a law of Constantine I that required a son to talce up the position of praetor, an appellate judge, if his father had died before performing the office. A century later, the law was extended so that a man who died without sons but with a daughter left her the responsibility. "For although it appears to be unlawful and disgraceful for warnen to advance to the Senatorial garb and insignia;' read a law issued by the emperors Valentinian I (ruled 364-375) and Valens (ruled 364-378), "nevertheless, they shall be able to assume the obligations of the ... praetorship [carnaria praetura]?'83 If women, who were excluded from advocating in court, were nonetheless assuming the obligations of praetor, the office could not have brought much real authority with it. 84 It should be noted that the law is unclearly worded and may only have obliged the warnen to pay the public expenses that came with the office and not to perform any of its judicial duties. Still, if warnen were inheriting some of the highest honors, even if only to increase public revenues, the distinctions between men's and women's roles, in particular their separation into public and private spheres, was becoming dangerously blurred. The shrinking political role of the nobility of Rome can best be

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demonstrated by the decline of the Senate, the preeminent body of politically infiuential Roman men. The Senate had already begun its decline from its earlier position as the cbief executive body for the republican state with th~ rise ofimperial authority in the first century. Even after the ·establishment of imperial nile, however, the Senate had guaranteed the political power of the early emperors, and no emperor had lasted long without its support. Early imperiallegislation, for example; even ifinitiated by the emperor, was typically debated in the Senate and then issued "with the advice of the Senate" (senatus consulta ). 85 Diodetian, however, introduced men of the provincial aristocracy into the Senate, enlarging it for that purpose from about six hundred to about two thousand members and consigning it by its size to uselessness. 86 Rome itself, where the Senate met, became somewhat of a political backwater in the last centuries of the Roman Empire. The imperial residence-and with it, much of the decision-making apparatus of the later empire-was removed first to Nicaea under Diocletian, then to the new capital under Constantine, and under the later Western emperors to Trier, Milan, and Ravenna. Emperors in the fourth and fifth centuries only issued independent decrees (constitutiones), and so the senatorial aristocracy was removed even from legislative power. 87 Despite the politicallimitations of the Senate ofRome, large numbers of men were willing to abandon their membership in the provincial or curial aristocracies and their participation in the governance of the provincial cities of the empire for admission to the senatorial dass. The reasons for this willingness to move from the provincial cities to Rome are not hard to fathom. Such a move at least exempted the individuals involved from the onerous public duties of their hometowns, for which they were responsible as provincial decurions (curiales). Chief among these duties was the collection of taxes. If they were unable to raise the tax revenues required for their locality, decurions were constrained to malce up the difference from their own incomes. 88 Numerous laws of the later emperors forbade decurions from abandoning the cities or their curial occupations. The laws made a concerted effort to close the loopholes through which one could escape such duties-except by permission of the emperor-again, by blurring the distinctions between men's and women's participation in such public duties. Daughters of decurions were never made responsible for the collection of taxes, even if theywere the sole heirs to their fathers, but later Roman law tied the sons and husbands of such heiresses to the curial obligations, which was not legal custom. 89 Moreover, despite the Roman legal principle that all children should assume the social status of their mother, a

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fift:h-century law required the taking of curial rank by any son of a decurion, even if his mother were a slave; so that he might assume. his father's duties at his death. 90 Thus the law obscured dass differences even ~s i.t · obscured gender differences. Sons ~d daughters of a declirion~madec .· senator were even forced back to their proyincial obligations ·after thdr. father's death; sons were eventually exempted from this reversal of status, although if a man had three sons, one had to be degraded to curial raril~. The legal changes by successive emperors on curial status only underscored the political wealmess of these classes, whose privileges existed only at the whim of the emperors. 91 At the same time that men of the traditional nobility were being squeezed from political power in the Senate and provincial councils, this power was being given to other men. In part, this reconfiguration of political power was a practical consequence of the expansion of the state service: the size of the bureaucracy had greatly increased as a result of the reforms ofDiocletian, who doubled the nurober of provinces. Still, new administrative posts in the i.nfiated bureaucracy of the later empire dwarfed the traditional offices in political importance. The new posts created a new aristocracy of men-sometimes men of the lower nobility, sometimes men of the lower classes, sometimes even freed slaves of the imperial household-who owed their political rise entirely to the emperor. The emperor Constantine, for example, established a new rarilc, counts (comites), whom he appointed to oversee provincial and urban administrations. 92 Even more significant for the shift in political power was the greater reliance of the emperor on his household staff for official responsibilities. This staff, lmown collectively as the palace (palatium ), performed various duties including those of ministers of state (praepositi), scribes (consistoriani), notaries (notarii), and domestic servants (cawrensiani). These functionaries were also mostly men of the lower classes, and many were slaves purchased by the imperial administration. 93 Their positions, nonetheless, put them in regular contact with the emperor and assured them opportunities for infiuence in a political regime dominated by those who gained the emperor's favor. The aristocratic reaction to the changing political realities was varied. Some men sought a place in the new hierarchy, and as early as the end of the fourth century, members of the old nobility were paying !arge sums for the privilege of talcing bureaucratic positions in the new imperial administration. Some might curry favor by more traditional means, using such occasions as the arrival of the emperor in a given location as an opportunity for imperial recognition and thus for political advancement.

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Some men of the old nobility channeled their political energies in subversive directions and r~sented or even rebelled against the authority of the state as an evil imposed on a helpless population. 94 . · Such new political i:ealities meant not only changing identities for the ·Roman elite as a wh,ole but for each man in that elite. No Ionger could men depend ori their participation in the governance of the empire i:o give· them a sen$e of accomplishment and power: participation in government, depende:O.t on the favor of the emperor, rather enforced their powerlessness. Samething new would have to be done to regain that sense ofpower, and that something was provided by the wealth of the uppei classes. UNMANLINESS AND THE LOVE OF LUXDRY

Given the ungratif}'ing role that public office held in the later Roman Empire, it is not surprising that many aristocratic men ignored their minor political role. Many men chose to abandon altogerher the pursuit of public authority and the cursus honorum) retreating instead to their rural estates to leadprivate lives. In doing so, however, they laid themselves open to charges that they had abandoned their masculine identity along with their public role. Sidonius Apollinaris chided a friend about his decision to remain in the country, because by doing so, he was turning his back on the public life that defined the Roman nobleman. He wrote: Why guide the plough-handle ... and yet forgo all ambition for the consul's robe? Do not bring a slur on the nobility by staying so constantly in the country. ... I would not indeed say that a wise man should fail to concern hirnselfwith his private affairs, but he should act on the even principle of considering not only what he should have but what he should be. Ifyou reject all other forms of accomplishments that noblemen should cultivate, and if the sting to extend your property is the only emotion that stirs you, then you may lookback on a name derived from consular robes, you may recall a series of curule seats [for dignitaries] and gilded traveling-chairs and purple mantles all recorded in the annals of the State, but nevertheless you will prove to be that obscure hard-working type who has less claim to be praised by the censor than to be preyed on by the tax-assessor. 95

The decision made by Sidonius's friend was apparently a common one. The descriptions of pastoral pleasures found in the Mosella of the poet Ausonius were followed with the wish that he be permitted to leave the emperor's service with the honorary title of consul and to retire to his

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lands in southern Gaul. Others voiced similar wishes. 96 Legislation reminded even governors of the Roman provinces that they must not prefer leisure activities to their duties and that they must reside in the C\lplc tals of their provinces and not on their country estates. 97 . . . . .. ·...· .· The acceptance of a qui
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and display the garments beneath, which are embroidered.... They presumably do not know .that their ancestors, who were responsible for the expansion ofRome, did not owe their distinction to riches, but overcame all obstades by their vator in fierce wars, in which, as far as wealth or style of · livil:Ig or dress was concerhed, they were indistinguishable from common soldiel's. 100 .

Once again, the vita militaris was contrasted with the vita mollitiae. To some exteilt, there was nothing new or nnexpected in these Roman moralists' condemnation of the wealth spent on clothing. Extravagant dress had always heen a cause for concern in Roman culture. Condemnations of the love of luxury in the later Roman Empire also reveal the greater availahility ofluxury items. After all, Romans had hy this point estahlished their domination over the Mediterranem littoral and its lucrative trade links with the lands heyond. The condemnations of Roman men's love of luxury prohahly also indicates the greater opportunity for purchasing luxury items, as the shrinking nllinhers of the aristocracy in the midst of a general demographic decline translated into greater wealth controlled hy fewer persons. The wealth exhihited in clothing, however, hecame the focus for considerahle anxiety ahout manliness. Again, this was nothing new, and even the earliest Roman writers had complained ahout the effeminacy of a man overly concerned with his appearance or his dress. Nonetheless, the question of manliness in dress was feit in a new way. In fact, we can pinpoint this new anxiety quite precisely to the heginning of the third century and the person of the emperor Elagahalus. Elagahalus was much maligned hy his hiographers. Among other things, he was supposed to have engaged in shockingly unmanly sexual practices, practices we will discuss in the next chapter. Here we will focus on Elagahalus's reputed hahit of dressing in women's clothing. Cross-dressing was not unlcnown in the ancient world, and it was a familiar theme of literature, if one usually associated with disguise. In the second-century Maamorphoses of Apuleius, for example, a rohher reconnts how he escaped capture: I put on a woman's fl.owery robe with loose billowy folds, covered my head with a woven turban, and wore a pair of those thin white shoes that ladies wear. Then, disguised and under cover of the weaker sex [insequior sexus], and riding on the back of a donk:ey loaded with ears ofbarley, I passed right through the lines of hostile soldiers. Thinking I was a donk:ey-woman [mulier asinaria], they allowed me free passage, for even then my beardless cheeks glistened with the smoothness ofboyhood. I did not, however, fall

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short of my father's reputation or my own manliness [virtus], although I was half afraid, being so close to those swords ofMars. 101

Note how even this temporary transvestite defends hls manlines~. (There ·· may also be a humoraus double entendre behind the idea of a '~dönkey- . woman"). Still, there is virtually no evidence formale cross-dr.essing except as a literary motif. . .. I would suggest that Blagabalus's supposed transvestism was merely an exaggeration of the wealth he spent an his attire, and the fact that he dressed in what were at the time Bastern fashions new to Rome. At the start of the third century, Roman men were still wearing the traditional white toga, although as Ammianus Marcellinus and others attested, that soon changed. 102 As the author ofthe HistoriaAugusta wrote ofBlagabalus: "He was the first of the Romans, it is said, who wore clothing wholly of sillc, although garments partly of sillc were in use before his time." 103 This account continued the description of Blagabalus's attire: He would wear a tunic made wholly of cloth of gold, or one made of purple, or a Persian one studded with jewels, and at such times he would say that he feit oppressed by the weight ofhis pleasures. He even wore jewels on his shoes, sometimes engraved ones-a practice which aroused the derisioJJ. of all, as ifthe engraving offarnaus artists could be seen on jewels attached to his feet. He wished to wear also a jeweled diadem in orderthat his beauty rnight be increased and his face loolc more like a woman's. 104

The Historia Augusta contrasted the depraved extravagance of Blagabalus with the self-restraint of his successor, Severus Alexander, who is supposed to have declared that "the imperial authority was based an manliness [virtus ], not an ornament." 105 "He hirnself had very few sillc garments, and he never wore one that was wholly sillc?' The account continued: "He would always insist most rigorously an having purple of the brightest hue, not for his own use but forthat of matrons"; and also: "the jewels that were given to him he sold, maintaining that jewels were for warnen and that they should not be given to a soldier or be warn by a man?' The author added: "And as for inserting gold threads [into cloth], he deemed it madness, since in addition to being rough they also made the garment sti.ff."106 Bqually interesting are those remarks in the HistoriaAugusta that indicate that what was novel during Blagabalus's reign in dress and other llLUiries had become more commonplace by the time the historical account was written. Or at least, such things were not unlcnown to the readers of the HistoriaAugusta. Blagabalus "was the first ... who wore cloth-

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ing wholly of sillc," "he was the first to use silver urns and casseroles;' "he was the first to malce force-meat of fish, or of oysters of various lcinds or similar shell-fish;' "he was the first to concoct wine .seasoned with [spiCes] ... which oui-luxury retains [and which] ... arenot met with in boolcs before the time of Blagabalus."107 The implication is that these things arii all farniliar to the readers of the Historia Augusta and that Blagabalus is to. blame for their introduction. But if Blagabalus was the first, he was not the last. Already by the late third century, men's garments made wholly of sillc had to be forbidden by imperial decree, so popular had they become, according to the account of the emperor Tacitus (ruled 275-276). 108 It is not all that surprising that Blagabalus should have introduced new and Bastern customs to Rome. He came from a prominent Syrian farnily and was not very Roman at all, although his mother insisted that he was the illegitimate son ofthe emperor Caracalla (ruled 211-217), a fiction that Blagabalus's cousin, Severus Alexander, used after him. Many men of the traditional senatorial aristocracy rejected the legitimacy ofhis rule because ofhis Bastern origins and tenuous linlcs to the Severan imperial dynasty, and any accusations of his transvestism must be placed within the context of the manifold attempts to discredit him. Cassius Dio, for example, consistently replaced Blagabalus's name with Pseudantoninus (the false Antonine) and with Sardanapalus, an ancientAssyrian lcing believed from Greelc legend to have worn women's clothing. The latter pseudonym worlced to remind his readers not only of Elagabalus's transvestism but also ofhis Bastern origins, origins that also emphasized his unmanliness.109 It is entirely possible that Blagabalus's cross-dressing was nothing more than his wearing of types of clothing considered effeminate by his contemporaries, clothing later adopted by many men of the Roman upper classes. We might also cantrast the depiction ofBlagabalus by western historians with that of an Bastern historian contemporary to Blagabalus and possibly also a Syrian lilce him, the historian Herodian. There is no talk of transvestism in Herodian's history. Elagabalus was said to have been warned, however, that "ifhe was wearing a strange, completely barbaraus dress" when he ruled at Rome, he would "offend the spectators who were not used to it and considered this lcind of finery more appropriate for women than men;" 110 And, more or less, that seems to have been what happened. So the concern about wealth spent on clothing, then, while framed in the traditionallanguage of effeminacy, was intimately related to anxiety about the exercise of political power. Later Roman emperors forbade their subjects from wearing garments of gold thread or purple, but these

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decrees went largely ignored, if the descriptions of the appearance of the later Romannobility affered by Aliunianus and others are to be believed. N onetheless, the emperors wore such garments the:mselves a~ syfl:lbols öf their unique position in society and topped their' outfits with:jewel~d diadems to symbolize their imperial rule . 111 The riches displayed in the clothing of the emperors who followed Elagabalus at a centtiry o.t' two's remove, tobe sure, was no sign ofunmanliness. Claudian's panegyrkto · the emperor Honorius included a lengthy description ofhis extravagant appearance, without a hint of embarrassment or criticism: Jewels of Ind.ia stud your vestment, rows of green emeralds ernich the seams; there gleams the amethyst and the glint of Spanish gold makes the dark-blue sapphire show duller with its hidden :fires. Nor in the weaving of such a robe was unadorned beauty enough; the work of the needle increases its value, thread of gold and silver glows therefrom; many an agate enlivens the embroidered robes, and pearls ofOcean breathe in varied pattern.112 The style of dress seems remarkably lilce that ofElagabalus, however. In fact, the only imperial figures whose luxurious dress was counted a sign of effeminacy were the usurpers. The poet Claudian accused Rufinus of designs on the imperial throne: his purple robe and jeweled crown became "a woman's raiment."113 "No woman was more elegantly groomed" than the usurper Maxirnus, according to the HistoriaAugusta. 114 A man attempting to usurp the throne in Julian's reign is said to have talcen "from the women's apartments a purple dress, and showed hirnself truly a tyrant:'115 The real cross-dressing happening here is nothing more than the usurper dressed up as emperor. Most discussions of luxuries as part of the trappings of imperial authority manifest some anxieties about manliness and unmanliness, and behind these discussions lay the anxieties about the new power arrangements. Julianis supposed to have rejected the use ofhis wife's necldace as a diadem for his impromptu acclamation as emperor, for example, and "protested that to wear a female trinlcet would be an inauspicious beginning [to his reign]?'116 A panegyric to the emperor Theodosius I celebrated his patronage of areturn to the frugal "soldier's life": [When] because either through long experience of the East or through the laxity ofmany ofyour imperial predecessors some men were so given up to extravagant living that it seemed by no means an easy task to restrain their inveterate practice of self-indulgence by any remedy, you wished the moral reform to begin with yourself ... For who could take it ill that he was be-

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ing confined to the limits of a prince, or be grieved that something was being subtracted from ~s private luxury, when he saw his e~peror, ruler of · t!le world, Plaster oflands and men, living frugally and contentedly, relieving long·fasts with the simple meals of a soldier, or, in addition to this, the . whole co.~, .sterner than the Spartan gymnasia, abounding in examples of toil, endurance and frugality; orthat not one man could be found to dare to demand at ·the palace-table fish from remote shores, fowl from foreign climes, a flower that was out of season? 117

The panegyrist contrasted Theodosius with "those delicate and languid men [delicati acftuentes] such as the state has often endured."m Since this oration was delivered in the wake ofTheodosius's military victory over the usurper Maximus in 389, it seems an obvious indictment of the previous emperor as both illegitimate in authority and unmanly in character. Nonetheiess, the panegyrist's praise did veil a reference to the limitations that the imperial rule placed on men, refus.irig them the free purchasing power of their wealth. Through all of these discussions of luxury, the interwoven reiations of political power and gender identity are evident. Even those wieiding supreme political power were not unaffected by anxiety about the use of wealth and the unmanliness of luxury. How much more acuteiy would this have been feit for those men of the aristocracy, removed from political infiuence, and fem.inized-always according to Roman misogynistic definitions offemininity-by their political insignificance, by their subsequent retreat to the private sphere of hearth and home, and by their reientless pursuit of luxury and ostentation. Abandoning the political responsibilities that were part of the accepted nature of men and instead assuming control of private roles, men of the later Roman aristocracy in effect renounced an important part of their masculinity. THE RISING POWER OF EUNUCHS

Among the luxuries that Roman men sought as visible representations of their wealth and Status were eunuch slaves. There is much evidence for the presence of eunuchs in !arge numbers in the later Roman Empire, despite the laws forbidding castration and the unease feit toward eunuchs. Ammianus Marcellinus enumerated the sorts of slaves one might find in a typical noble household, including "a crowd of eunuchs, young and old?'119 "Crowds of eunuchs:' "armies of eunuchs:' and "troops of eunuchs" surrounded wealthy Roman women as personal servants, complained the Christian writer Jerome. 120 The author of the Historia

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Augusta recorded without comment that the emperor Aurelian (ruled 270-2 75) had "limited the possessionofeunuchs to those who had a sen- . ator's ranking, for the reason that they had reached inordinate pric;es?m 1 · Populations of the eastern Mediterranem had made use of eimuch~ ~s domestic slaves from ancient times. In the western Mediterranem, how- · ever, the presence of eunuchs is attested only insmall numbers before the · third century C.E. 122 Various factors encouraged the movement of eunuchs westward in the later empire, by bringing Romans into contact with peoples and farnilies that kept eunuchs. These factors included the intermarriage of ethnic Romans with other peoples in the empire after the extension ofRoman citizenship to all free inhabitants ofthe empire, the general migrationwestward away from the more populated eastern Mediterranean toward the less populated western Mediterranean and the general Bastern infl.uence resulting from the Roman administration of the Bastern provinces, the Bastern dynasties on the imperial throne, and the removal of the imperial court to Nicaea and Constantinople. Romans in the later empire preserved their belief in the Bastern origins of castration: Ammianus Marcellinus repeated a legend that the Assyrian queen Semiramis had begun the practice. 123 The idea that Semiramis, a woman believed in antiquity to have been the :first to have raised herself to the masculjne status of royal rule, was also first responsible for the lowering of meri. to the feminine status of eunuchs, probably seemed plausible to ancient storytellers. Indeed, many of the slaves in elite Roman households in the late ancient West seem to have been ofEastern and often foreign birth. A loophole in the Roman laws agairrst castration perrnitted this practice. For example, Constantine's law agairrst castration, significantly addressed to the commander of the army in Mesopotamia, forbade only the malcing of eunuchs "within the Roman Empire" (in orbe Romano ). 124 Alaw of the fifthcentury Bastern emperor Leo I referred to the horror of "men of the Roman race, who have been made eunuchs ... in a barbaraus country" but then granted perrnission "to all traders to buy or sell, wherever they please, eunuchs ofbarbarous nations who have been madesuch outside the boundaries of Our Empire.'ms As a result, most of the eunuchs of the period whose origins we can trace were from Bastern peoples. Ammianus Marcellinus, for example, described the origins of the eunuch Eutherius. "He was born in Armenia;' he wrote. "His parents were free, but at an early age he was captured by members of a neighboring hostile tribe, who castrated him and sold him to some Roman merchants, by whom he was brought to Constantine's palace.'' 126 Eunuchs frequently bare Basternsounding names of Greek or barbarian origin. 127 Of course, the Bastern

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origin of eunuchs only highlighted their unmanliness, reinforcing Roman beliefs in the general unmanliness of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. . Eimuchs liad also iong served in the royal administrations of the ancient and Hell~nistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. In some ways, their :infl:uence with kings was rrierely an extension of their domestic duties, worlcing as mediators between women and meri and between servants and masters within the hausehold and without. However, castrated men made suitable ministers of state for other reasons. First, because they were typically slaves or freedmen raised from humble origins and from other peoples to these positions of authority, they did not have the factionalloyalties or family alliances that created obligations formen of the nobility, and they were not prone to the nepotism of the aristocracy. Second, because they could not produce children, there was no possibility that they would try to pass their offices, honors, or possessions to sons as inheritances, leaving these positions firmly in the monarch's control of appointment. Third, eunuchs posed little threat of usurpation, since even if they might desire to talce the throne, they could found no dynasty to rival the succession to the established ruler. The Roman emperors did not long ignore the convenience of eunuchs in positions of responsibility. Already in the early empire, a few eunuchs served in the imperial household in some reigns. 128 It is from the third century, however, that eunuchs became a regular and dominant presence in imperial administrations. Their arrival in large numbers is often attributed to Elagabalus, which is possible: his Syrian family would certainly have had eunuch servants. It is equally possible, however, that eunuchs had entered the imperial service a few years earlier during the reign of Caracalla, whose consort Plautilla was said to have been reared in a household of over one hundred eunuchs produced especially for her. 129 The association of the emperor Elagabalus with the arrival of eunuchs in Rome may simply be a reflection ofhis bad reputation. The author of theHistoriaAugusta-who wrote his history long after eunuchs had become a majorpower in the empire-considered it a sign ofElagabalus's unmanliness that he had relied so heavily on eunuchs in his bureaucracy and a sign of the manliness of his cousin and successor, Severus Alexander, that he had dismissed from office the whole lot of them. The latter was alleged to have said, "I will not permit slaves purchased with money to sit in judgment on the Jives of prefects and consuls and senators;''130 The point of the mention of eunuchs in the HistoriaAugusta was clearly to underline the disruption of the social order that results from the inappropriate exercise of authority. The unsuitable rule of an effeminate lilce

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Elagabalus paralleled his delegation of authority to men equally unfit to hold office because of their emascuhition and low birth. Seve:rus Alexan~ der, who was generally depicted as the moral opp()site to Etagabalus (re- . call how he refused to wear jewelry and silk), restoted all things tö th~l.r proper place: He removed all eunuchs from his service and gave orders tha:t they should · serve his wife as slaves. And whereas Elagabalus had been the slave of his eunuchs, Alexander reduced them to a lirnited number and removed them from all duties in the Palace except the care of the women's baths; and whereas Elagabalus had also placed many over the administration of the finances and in procuratorships, Alexander took away from them even their previous positions. 131

The cantrast was obvious: the true place for eunuchs was not with the men but with the women, in the private and not the public spaces. The tension between manliness and unmanliness in the guise of political and domestic spheres was played out here in the appointments of eunuchs. The greater use of eunuchs in the later Roman imperial bureaucracy is intimately connected both to the increasing autocracy of later Roman rule and to the exclusion of the old nobility from political power. Ancient writers )'Vere well aware of theselinks between the power of the emperors and the eunuchs, on the one hand, and the impotence of the traditional noble classes, on the other. The author oftheHistoriaAugusta> for example, concluded his biography of Severus Alexander with these conunents: It must be added, furthermore, that he never had eunuchs in his councils or in official positions-these creatures alone cause the downfall of emperors, for they wish them to live in the manner of foreign nations or as the kings of the Persians, and keep them weil removed from the people and from their friends, and they are go-betweens, often delivering messages other than the emperor's reply; hedging him about, and aiming, above all things, to keep knowledge from him. 132

The battle between noblemen and eunuchs over access to the emperor had already been lost by the time these words were penned. VJrtUally all fourth- and fifth-century emperors associated themselves with powerful eunuch ministers. Eunuchs held a variety of positions in the imperial palace, but it was especially in the office of grand chamberlain (praepositus sacri cubiculi), an office reserved almost exclusively to eunuchs, that they exerted the greatest dominance. 133 By the early fourth century, the grand chamberlain held the right of senatorial rank and the title of clarissimus; in 384, his rank was raised to the level of illustris> to which prefects be-

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longed. From 422, grand chamberlains toolc the title of eminentissimus; shared by only tl1e magister militum and the praetorian prefects. 134 That eunuchs should receive the same ranlcs and the associated privileges as those ·accorded the men of the ancient nobilitywas the source of ·great resentment. Claudius Mamertinus noted with disgust how "even the illustrim.is representatives of the old faniilies ... fawn upon the most degraded [sordidissimz] arid infamaus [probrosissimi] creatuies of the imperial court.''135 "Were it not that the mighty gods watch over the Roman Empire:' the author of the HistoriaAugusta remarlced bitterly, "even now we should be sold by purchased eunuchs as though we were the slaves [and not them] .''136 No response to the rising power of the eunuchs was more acrimonious than that ofthe poet Claudian in his In Eutropium (About Eutropius). The poem has been called "the cruelest invective in all ancient literature.''137 It is little more than a long harangue against the most powerful eunuch ofClaudian's day. Eutropius was grand chamberlain to the Bastern Roman emperor, Arcadius, who appointed Eutropius to the honori.fic title of consul for the year 399. It was this appointment that provolced Claudian's poetical response. Claudian had his reasons for portraying Eutropius in as unfl.attering a light as possible. Claudian owed much ofhis literary reputation to the patronage of Stilicho, commander in chief (magister militum) ofthe western Roman army and advisoi to the Western emperor Honorius, the younger brother of the Eastern emperor Arcadius. Stilicho had distinguished hirnself in battle on the N orth African frontier, an event Claudian had also commemorated inverse. Stilicho had hoped to be named consul for the year 399, even though as a barbarian he would have been an equally unconventional choice for the honor. Since the choice belonged to the elder of the emperors, however, Arcadius had chosen his own political associate and not his brothers. From the Western Empire and therefore safely out of Eutropius's political reach, Claudian launched a literary attaclc on behalf ofhis own patron, the purpose of which was to discredit Eutropius both as a man and as a politician. The poem relies on earlier Latin models, but incorporates entirely new elements-some invented and some based on historical events-in order to defame Eutropius. 138 In Eutropium is hardly a reliable account of a eunuch's life or career. It is, however, an extremely useful and detailed account of the challenge to men's roles and identity occasioned by the presence of so powerful a eunuch. We will have many reasons to turn to Claudian's poem here andin the next chapter for its fascinating insights into eunuchs and masculinity. Centtal to Claudian's poetical attack was the fact that Eutropius was a eu-

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nuch. His elevation to such a position of honor was, in Claudian's estimation, an unnatural USurpation of masccline political authority by an individual who was no man at all. The fust part of Claud.ian's poem fo~ cuses on Eutropius's lowly origins as a foreign, Bastern slave, anc!'howhe was bought and sold to several owners for domestic service before being purchased for the imperial household. (We will d.iscuss .the sexual impli~ cations of this part of Claud.ian's poem in greater detail in the next chap- . ter.) Doubtless Claud.ian was seelcing to undermine Eutropius's political reputation by emphasizing his foreign and lowly status. Claud.ian had much to say about the political authority that Eutropius wielded: "Nothing so cruel as a man raised from lowly station to prosperity"; "he vents his rage on all, that all may deem he has the power";· "being a eunuch also he is moved by no natural affection and has no care for family or children." 139 Determined to defend traditional Roman masculinity against this latest assault- or so he claimed-the poet piled insult after insult onto Eutropius, "an old woman in ~ consul's robe who gives a woman's name to the year." 14° Claud.ian made use of the whole arsenal of established anti-effeminate and misogynistic ideology for his purposes. ''No country hasever had a eunuch for a consul or judge or general;' he wrote; ''what in a man is honorable is d.isgraceful in a eunuch.'' 141 Or again: "Had a woman assumed theJasces [symbols of political authority], though this were illegal it were nevertheless less d.isgraceful.'' 142 Or yet again: "If eunuchs shall give judgment and determine laws, then let men card wool and live like the Amazons, confusion and license d.ispossessing the order of nature.''143 With these words, Claud.ian linked the rise of eunuchs to the decline of"true" men. It is not d.ifficult to understand why Claud.ian resented the political power wielded by eunuchs in the later empire. Eunuchs holding prestigious imperial offices served as visible signs of the increasing autocracy of the emperor, his isolation from aristocratic control, the extension of the bureaucracy, and the other political shifts of the third, fourth, and early fifth centuries. AB men's public and military status declined, the successes of eunuchs became emblematic of men's reversal of fortunes and a convenient scapegoat for the rancor of the elite dass es. Among the many worries to which the consulship ofEutropius gave rise, Claud.ian added the military fate of the empire. "What lcind of wars can we wage now that an effeminate [mollis] talces the auspices [symbols of military authority] ?" he asked. 144 Claud.ian was alluding to the fact that Eutropius had been rewarded with the consulship in part because ofhis successfulleadership of a military campaign against the Huns in 398. In mentioning the defenses of the empire, however, Claud.ian was also al-

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luding to a familiar source of male an.uety in the later Roman Empire. He wrote: Our enemies rejoiced at the sight [of a eunuch leading a Roman army] and feit that at last we were lacking in men. Towns [in the empire] were set ablaze; walls offered no securicy. The countryside was ravaged and . brought to ruin.... 'Yet Eutropius (can a slave, an effeminate [mollis], feel · shame? ... ), Eutropius returns in triumph. The troops are mutilated, squadrons Wc~ their amputated leader, maniples of eunuchs .... Great is his self-esteem; he struggles to swell out his pendulous cheelcs and feigns a heavy panting; his lousy head dust-sprinlded and his face filthier in the sun, he sobs out some pitiful complaint with voice more effeminate than effeminacy's seifand tells ofbattles.l45

He ended with the quip, "Leave arms to men;'' 146 There is some evidence for the use of trusted eunuchs of the imperial household in military campaigns. AB with their elevation to civil commands, eunuchs placed in charge of troops posed no threat to the imperial succession, and this was especially important in a period in which generals had so often led coups against the state. 147 To see military commands given to eunuchs, unmanly foreigners of low birth, might have been particularly galling to Roman men of the upper classes, reluctant as they were to talce partinwar themselves. One example of the role of a typical eunuch among the troops must suffice to demonstrate this point. Ammianus Marcellinus provided an excellent example in his detailed account of the career of Eusebius, grand chamberlain under Constantius II (ruled 351-361). Eusebius made his first appearance at the mutiny of the soldiers at Chälon in Gaul in 354, when Constantius sent him from the imperial treasury with money, "which he distributed secredy among the authors of the agitation;'' Ammianus added dryly, "This quieted the unrest of the troops?' 148 Eusebius next appeared as one of several eunuchs at the imperial court who falsely accused Ursicinus, master of the infantry, of preparing to usurp the throne, although the true motive, according to Ammianus, was that Ursicinus refused to donate to Eusebius an estate ofhis in Antioch that Eusebius coveted. 149 After the accusation, Constantius sent Eusebius together withArbitio, master ofthe cavalry and not a eunuch, to investigate the alleged treason. Ammianus described their actions: both these were men of careless arrogance, equally capable of injustice and cruelcy. Without any thorough investigation, without drawing any distinction between innocent and guilty, they sentenced some to exile after being

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beaten or tortured, reduced others to the ranks, and condemned the rest to capital punishment. Then, having filkd the cetneteries with corpses, they · retumed as iffrom a successful campaign, and reported their exploits to the: · . emperor. 150

Even Arbitio hirnself, Ammianus claimed, was too afraid of EusebiuS's power to come to Ursicinus's aid. 151 When Ursicinus, in his own defense, reproached the emperor for having "allowed hirnself to be dictated to by eunuchs;' the remark so angered Constantius that he immediately disrnissed U rsicinus from his office. 152 Ammianus's point is clear: the power of the eunuch Eusebius was fearsome. Eusebius's arrogance and cruelty J?ay have been accurately depicted; more likely, it reflected the lade of manly virtue that all eunuchs represented. The next time we hear ofEusebius is also the last; his career ended tagether with his life, and bothat the death ofhis patron, Constantius TI. Julian, who blamed the chamberlain for the death ofhis brother Gallus, had him condemned to death as soon as he took command of the empire.153 It was an end typical for eunuchs, tied as their fortunes were to individual emperors. (Even the eunuch Eutropius was executed within a year of his appointment as consuU 54) "This man, who had been raised from the lowest station to a position which enabled him almost to give orders lilce those of the emperor himself;' Ammianus concluded ofEusebius, "in consequence had become intolerable. Pate threw him headlong, as if from a lofty cli:tf.'' 155 Ultimately, the prosperity and prestige of the eunuchs was an indictment of all Roman men of the upper classes. If men feared eunuchs, lilce Arbitio before Eusebius, it was because they feared the power of the emperor beyond them. Claudian recognized this fear, and at the end of his poem against Eutropius, turned his venomous pen against his contemporaries. "Will this corrupt age never stiffen up?" he asked, with obvious double entendre. 156 "0 people worthy of such a senate, senate worthy of such a consul! To thinlc that all these bear arms and use them not, and that, among so many, these swords do not bring to mind their manly sex with indignation!" 157 Consequently, he put the full weight of responsibility for the barbarian invasion on the unmanly men of the empire, meaning not the eunuchs but all Roman men: It is neither on their own valor or numbers that they rely; it is our own cowardice urges them on, cowardice and the treason of generals, through whose guilt our soldiers now ßee before their own captives, whom, as Danube's stream weil knows, they once subdued; and those now fear a handful who once could drive back all. 158

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As if to sum up what it was all about, the last word of Claudian's poem against Eutropius was the word virtus. 159 the end, the power of eunuchs was a disgracefully visible reminder of the failure ofRoman masculine ideals. Eunuchs in politics and as army commanders ~erelyreflectedthe unwillingness or inability of"real" men to hold the saffie publi~ positions. Anxiety over manliness in public life, such as seen in .discussiöns of the authority exercised by eunuchs, only reflected the exclusion of the male aristocracy from the positions they had traditionally held and felt themselves entitled to hold. In a symbolic sense, it was an exclusion from their public masculine identity.

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"A PURITY HE DOES NOT SHOW HIMSELF" Masculinity_, the Later Roman H ousehold_, and Men-'s Sexuality The reorientation of the public lives of men of the Romanelite in late antiquity unfolded in taudem with an equal transformation in their private lives. In the realm of marriage and family life, men of the Roman nobility feit the consequences of social and legal changes that brought into serious qlj-estion their traditional rights as husbands and fathers over their wives arid children. In the area of sexuality, newly imposed restrictions greatly curtailed men's traditional sexual behaviors, sexual self-control replacing sexual dominance as the masculine ideal. These changes and restrictions also posed a threat to traditional Roman gender boundaries, obscuring the divisions between men's and women's social roles and challenging the basis of these divisions. The presence of eunuchs in the later Roman household only heightened the anxiety over men's changing domestic and sexual roles. THE DECLINE OF PATRIA POTESTAS

Patria potestas (paternal power), the near-absolute control in ancient Roman society that the eldest living male of a noble family exercised, was proverbial. 1 In the early Roman period, the power of this male, called the paterfamilias (father of the household), over all ofhis descendants had induded his right to control all property or money that they had garnered, to choose their marriage partners or end their marriages, and even to sell them into slavery or abandon them at birth. The paterfamilias wielded authority over his wife in the same way, who was legally the equivalent to a daughter, according to the system of marriage "with the hand" (cum 70

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manu). Patria potestas perpetuated itseJffrom generation to generation: each male achieved independence upon his father's death and became a pateifamilias in his own right, while the legal control of an unmarried woman fell afterher.father's death to her brother or other close male relative, and the ~ontrol of widowed woman to her son or other male ·relative of her husbahd, a lifelong tutelage of women (tutela perpetua mulierum). 2 · The absoluteness of these patriarchal rights may have been in part mythical, because the earliest periods of Roman history already show some restraints on the rights of a father. Even before the republican era, the law denied fathers complete autonomy in exposing unwanted children and regulated the sale of their children into slavery. 3 Scholars have typically interpreted such changes to the patriarchal system as the encroachment of the rights of the state on the rights of the individual man. 4 Even more recently, scholars have examined the restraints that human feeling placed on the unrestricted exercise of patemal power by creating sentimental ties between a father and his family. 5 Moreover, scholars have noted how women wielded informal authority within the patriarchal household, especially in home management. 6 Still, Roman writers generally looked bade on their past as a golden age of unobstructed men's rights. 7 The constraints on patria potestas, it should be noted, often happened within the context of a struggle between the rights of men as fathers and their rights as husbands. Fathers likely engineered the decline of the marriage "with the hand" by the end of the republican era, for example, so that their financial interests would not be lost by a daughters marriage. 8 In a marriage ''without the hand" (sine manu), a husband could not expect any direct financial gain from his wife's family. Instead, he received a dowry from his wife as her share ofher father's estate. While he controlled its use as well as the income from it during their marriage, he could not sell or otherwise alienate it, and it reverted to her family of birth at his death or upon their divorce. 9 The pateifamilias did retain the right to choose his children's marriage partners and to initiate their divorce. 10 Patriarchal rights continued to decline in the early imperial period. New imperiallegislation ofEmperor Augustus probably only cemented what was already social custom in the later republic. N onetheless, the legal reforms of Augustus did permit the state to intrude in new ways into the private lives of men. 11 His reforms included penalties against men and women who chosenot to marry, not to have children, or not to remarry after divorce or the death of their spouse. 12 Augustus's concerns at the declining numbers of the Romannobility and the need for even !arger num-

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bers of them to enforce the Roman governance of the Mediterranem lilcely prompted this law, since it was apparently enforced only among . the upper dass es of the Roman population. Ariother of Augustus'~ laws . confirms his demographic concerns: it gave women who bcire $eve,r:3.1. children a privilege known as the "right of children" (ius liberomm) ·of· · freedom from their lifelong tutelage. Women with this privilege ad- · ministered their own financial affairs without the bindirig supervision of a male relative. 13 Legal changes to family life in the early empire further eroded the absolute nature of patriarchal authority. By the second century of the common era, for instance, women gained the right to initiate divorce, a right previously only belonging to their husbands and fathers. At about the same time, fathers lost the right to force a divorce of a sonor daughter under their authority if the couple did not want to separate. 14 The pateifamilias was also restricted in his ability to force an unwanted marriage on those under his authority. 15 Also during the second century, edicts permitred some men to leave property in wills to their mothers, who earlier had been forbidden to own property at all. Mothers were permitted, in turn, to leave such property to their children and to bequeath their dowries to their children rather than have the property be reappropriated by theif pateifamilias. Moreover, mothers might write such a will without the supervision of their legal guardian. 16 The hitherto male domains of marital consent, ownership of property, and testation were now shared bywomen. The demise of patria potestas continued in the later Roman Empire. The public crisis of the empire certainly played a role in this demise. The deterioration ofRome's military greatness and the numbers killed in the periods of civil unrest and rebellion seem only to have worsened the demographic decline. 17 The decline in numbers in the upper classes was somewhat alleviated by the influx of a new nobility drawn from the provinces made possible by the extension of Roman citizenship to the free inhabitants of the empire in 212 C.E. The new Romans, however, brought not only new potential marriage partners into contact with the old elites, but also new customs of marriage and family life. 18 In the later empire, further changes to women's rights challenged men's fundamental authority over them. Foremost among these changes were those concern.ing marriage payments. Specifically, the later empire saw the establishment of a reverse dowry system that equaled in value the traditional dowry. Under the title ofbetrothal gift:s, the future husband's father gave substantial benefits, usually properties, to the betrothed couple for use in their marriage, just as the dowry provided the opportunity

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for the bride's father to give properties to the couple. 19 The exact nature of the establishment ofa reverse dowry system in this period has not been well studied but is clear from the sources. 20 The reasons for such a shift .are equally obscure. 21 But one law noting the increasing value of marriage payments provides a possible explanation forthisdouble system. 22 The · combination of a dowry and reverse dowry provided a double mechanisin for the transfererice of properties from one generation to the next in an environment.of low birthrates in which family inheritances fell into ever fewer hands. Laws originally enacted to protect women's dowries continued to apply to the reverse dowry. The effect of these laws was, therefore, to further restriet men's rights within the family. For example, even while the property designated as her betrothal gifts did not come from her family, the wife was legal owner of it, and her husband could not alienate it nor could she legally give it to him. The betrothal gifts also belonged to her when the marriage ended. 23 She was obliged to preserve the value of the betrothal gifts intact for her children if she had them or for her husband's parents if theywere still alive. In other cases, the property was hers to dispose of as she wished, and in any case she had free use of the property's usufruct. 24 The rights of women to possess and bequeath inheritances and dotal properties in the later empire was combined with a greater control over the disposition of the actual property during their lifetimes, a change made possible because of the disappearance of the lifelong tutelage of women. This ancient principle, which had obliged a man to manage all property owned by women, disappeared as a social institution sometime between the third and fifth century. The jurisprudents of the later second and early third century C.E. had already generally concurred that the legal incapacity of women was merely customary and had nothing to do with their intellectual abilities. 25 At the beginning ofthe fourth century, Emperor Constantine permitred women of good character over the age of eighteen to control their own property, although they still seem to have had to retain legal guardians. 26 By the end of the fourth century, legislation specifically treated women as legally equivalent to men in the administration of their affairs and ignored the tutelage of women, which must have had little consequence. 27 Indeed, a law of 414 ordered that all contracts made by women be considered as binding: a clear indication of women's independence in these matters, as is another law permitring women to act as guardians for their children. 28 Such formal changes in the legal position ofwomen carried tremendous social consequences. Consider the disparate ages of marriage be-

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tween men and women, for instance, which typically saw a woman not much past puberty marry a man perhaps decades older, and probably out- . live him and his parents. 29 Given the dramatic decline in the birthrate in · the later empire, many married couples might weil have had n6 .cliil~en . surviving them, and a widowed wife might.have no natural helrs. Dndi::t, the old Augustan laws, widows under the age of fifty were required to.te- · marry within two years or lose full ownership of their property, but in the year 320, Emperor Constantine ended the penalties against the unmarried. 30 Such circumstances conspired to produce large numbers of independent widows in the fourth and fifth centuries: women in full possession of large estates, without male guardians or natural heirs, and not obliged to remarry. The numbers ofindependent widows troubled many male writers; the emperor Majorian condemned their "lascivious freedom ofliving?'31 The Christian writer Jerome also complained that even widows who chose to remarry insisted on their independence. "Rejoicing that they have at length escaped from a husband's dominion:' he wrote, "they look about for a new mate, intending not to yield him obedience, as God ordained, but to be his lord and master. With this object they choose poor men, husbands only in name, who must patiently put up with rivals, and if they murrnur can be lcicked out on the spot?'32 That men had been enjoying such freedoms since ancient times was not the point; here is dear evidence of the real decline of men's patriarchal authority over women. Indeed, Majorian's law attempted to do away altogerher with independent widows, ordering all childless widows under the age offorty to remarry within :five years or face :financial penalties. Before the deadline had passed, however, the law was repealed by his successor.33 Legal reforrns ofthe later Roman Empire also greatly disrupted the patriarchal rights of men over their children. Later imperiallegislators expressly repealed the ancient custom that gave fathers the natural right to any inheritances of their minor children, an obvious indication of the declining authority of men. 34 Severallaws repeatedly denied fathers the permission to sell property inherited by any of their children from their mother's relatives. (The repetition ofthese laws provides evidence both for fathers' opposition to the law and for a persistent intent on the part of legislators). 35 Legislation also gave children the right to receive the inheritance due them from their mother and her relatives during her lifetime, without interference from their father. 36 N or did the law permit a father to have any rights to the property that his children had gained by their own marriages. 37 Indeed, ifhis children died with their own children living, the law considered these persons, his grandchildren, as the

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natural heirs to the property that had belonged to his children, to his complete exclusion, even if as his descendants they livedunder his patriarchal authority. 38 Other l<J.WS contributed to the growing restriction of men's rights over their families. One law grmted permission for children to talce their father to corirt. 39 Legitimate children had tlie right to expect the full inheritar.:ice from their father," and even a man of the highest social classes was prohibited fromJeaving any part ofhis estate to illegitimate children, if this excluded his legitimate heirs. 40 Allofthis legislation on children's rights has been associated with Christian influence, but the fiurry oflegislative activity on the topic of children more likely reß.ects the desire, as with the laws on the reverse dowry, to create new mechanisms for the transference of property from one generation to the next in a period of declining birthrates. 41 Regardless of their origin, the laws succeeded in restricting men's rights to control the inheritances of their wives and children. Legislators were obviously aware of the decline ofpatria potestas and concerned about the implications of this decline for men's status. A law of the year 426 specifi.cally degraded the legal status of mothers as regarded children's inheritances in order to bring it to the level of the status of fathers, arguing that "We shall not allow fathers to be legally inferior to mothers in any particular.''42 Nevertheless, the overall attempt seems to have been to equalize men's and women's positions regarding children. This is the stated intent of one law. "It is Our Will that husbands also shall be admonished by a similar example ofboth piety and law:' the law reads, so that "what is enjoined upon mothers by the necessity ofthe law, as here set forth, is more readily expected of [fathers] in consideration of justice.''43 Asthelegal positions ofmen and women in family law moved ever more closely tagether in the later empire, yet another aspect of men's social superiority was threatened. There were still significant social differences between men and women, to be sure. Even in one of the more significant changes to the legal status ofmarriage, a law ofConstantine that put an end to divorce "for trivial reasons:'44 noticeable differences remained between the effects of the law on men compared with its effects on women. A man might still divorce his wife for adultery; for being a conciliatrix) literally a "mediator" but meaning someone involved in prostitution, possibly as a "gobetween" between the prostitute andher customer; or for being a medicamentaria) a "female medical practitioner:' perhaps a women who used medicines to avoid pregnancy or to proeure an abortion, but possibly a woman who made or sold poisons. 45 In contrast, the same law denied a

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woman permission to divorce her husband for excessive drinking, gambling, or for being a muliercularius) an otherwise unattested term ofuncertain meaning that we will discuss below. She could, however, obtain !1 .. legal divorce ifhe were a murderer, a tomb robber,6r a medicamen~arius)· that is, a "male medical practitioner:' again possibly an abortionist or p'o1- ' soner. 46 Both sets of restrictions are interesting comment& on the absolute limits of unacceptable behavior formen and warnen wirhin marriage. According to the law, if the couple separated for any other reason thart those delineated, neither could remarry. The penalty exacted from a woman who remarried was still greater than that from a man, though, since she forfeited her dowry if she were guilty of any of the three offenses delineated for her or if she left her husbarid for any but the three offenses delineated for him. If he were guilty of any of the offenses, or left her for other reasons, he lost his access to her property but not to his own property. Still, if a man remarried after leaving his wife unjusdy, she had the right to claim his second wife's dowry. 47 After Constantine's law restricting divorce, men of the later empire also lost the right to repudiate a marriage partner at will, another significant curtailment of their traditional rights. In earlier periods, divorce had been an effective tool for maintaining patriarchal authority. It was especially useful for reformulating elite alliances, because men could divorce warnen who belonged to families on the wane politically and replace them with others who were more advantageous. Men could also ensure heirs by marrying warnen who had proved their fertility in previous marriages.48 Constantine's law denied these strategies to elite faniilies, again probably for other than religious reasons. 49 Not surprisingly, the law proved unpopularwith the Romannobility, and was briefiy abrogated by the emperor Julian, in a law not preserved, but presumably overturned by Jovian (ruled 363-364). 50 The divorce law was also annulled briefiy byTheodosius li (ruled 408-450) in 43951 but was revived under Valentinian III in 452. 52 By the mid-fifth century, then, the state held the rights of divorce firmly in its possession, dispensing it only infrequendy. The narrowing of men's freedom of actionwirhin marriage and family life through the decline ofpatria potestas must be talcen as further evidence ofthe declining fortunes ofRoman men. Although the political turbulence of the later Roman period had persuaded many men to escape the hazards of public o:ffi.ce and military life and concentrate their personal ambitions wirhin their private lives, neither marriage nor the family affered any guarantee of masculine success or the authority that men had traditionally wielded. Instead, the growing power of warnen and children wirhin the elite family only intensifi.ed the disruption to Roman men's ideals.

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UNMANLINESS AND MALE SEXUALITY

The relationship between the eliteRomanmale and those araund him was certainly in fhix in the last centuries of the empire. N onetheless, it was not orily his relationship to others, but his very relationship with himselfwith his body and his lise ofit in sexual activity---'- that was being drastically altei:ed. More iniportant, men believed that the changes theywere experiencing were und~rmining the manliness of male sexuality. Roman men were still bound by ancient codes of sexual behavior, but sexual morality as developed in the later empire added new restrictions to these ancient codes. Previously accepted patterns of sexual behavior with little or no social reproach fell under social sanction and legal prohibition. Philosophical and medical perspectives also limited men's sexual behavior. The changing nature of male sexuality has already come to the attention of some historians of the classical period of Roman history, and scholars have theorized about the ways in which political and social changes affected men's sexuality. In particular, they have looked for consequences of the shift from a republic controlled by the male elite as a collective body of men to an empire ruled by a single man, as seen, for example, in the restructuring of the early imperial family by the Augustan laws. Same of these scholars have concluded that in the context of men's declining authority within the state and within the family, men of the early empire sought greater authority within themselves, including a sexual self-control. 53 The possibility of a connection between sociopölitical changes and changes to sexuality deserves consideration. Indeed, one might speculate that in the later Roman Empire the connection between the two is even clearer. After all, the final centuries of the Western Empire witnessed the further decline of men's authority in the state and in the family as well as the collapse of military effectiveness. As an explanation for cultural change, however, this connection leaves much to be desired. One might speculate with equal plausibility that the loss of authority in politics would have led Roman men to strengthen their sexual hold on those persons they could still dominate within their households. lt is also clifficult to speculate that the downfall of the system of elite familial alliances led men to focus on the conjugal unit and on marital fidelity; such speculation is unable to explain the free access to divorce in the early empire and the restrictions on divorce in the later empire. lt also seriously underestimates the continued strength of familial alliances in the imperial period. If we cannot see the social and political changes as the cause of the changes to men's sexuality, it is iniportant nonetheless to see them both as

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parts of a whole. Anxiety about the male role, an anxiety created in the midst of social and political crisis, was also feit in the arena of sexuality. Sexual prowess was as central to masculine ideritity in classkal Rome ·as was participation in public life; both sexual and political dominance w~.;re understood as the proper positioning of adult males. 54 In both politics and sex, moreover, attempts were made to avert the challenges to masculinity by avoiding the uncomfortable roles available to later Roman men. But just as men's withdrawal from politics only served to malce their role closer to that of warnen, and thus to obscure the traditional division between men's and women's public identities, the changes to male sexuality in late antiquity also assimilated men's sexuality to women's and further eroded the separation between men's and wömen's roles and identities. Ammianus Marcellinus's description of the emperor Julian illustrates both the restrained ideal of men's sexuality and the attempts to linlc that ideal to a traditional sense of manliness. vVe have already seen that Ammianus regarded Julian as an ideal man generally. Ammianus praised Julian at length for his decision to renounce sex after the death of his wife as a manly autonomy: "he was so spectacularly and incorruptibly chaste after the lass ofhis wife he never tasted the pleasures ofsex, but [said] ... that he was glad to have escaped from slavery to so mad and cruel a tyrant as love?,'55 These remarlcs followed immediately after Ammianus's general assessment ofJulian's character-even before the description ofJulian's vitamilitaristhat follows it, or the description ofJulian's courage and slcill in battle, or the description of the authority that Julian exercised over his army. 56 Clearly Julian's renunciation of sex proved his manliness of character in Ammianus's eyes, at least as much as did his military prowess. Ammianus clarified his understanding of the manliness ofJulian's sexual abstinence by describing the emperor as virtually assurning the philosopher's mantle (pallium ). 57 Linlcing the renunciation ofsex to the pursuit of philosophy helped to assimilate it to the Stoic apatheia and the mind's mastery over the body and its feelings. (Not surprisingly, Stoic writers were among the first to call for men's sexual restraint, lang before the ideal was generally promoted in the later Roman Empire.) This image also helped to associate Julian with the Platonic ideal ofthe philosopherlcing: the man who pursues virtue both privately and publicly, exercising the same authority over hirnself as over his subjects. Self-domination as a legitimation for the domination of others was a sentiment common to writers of late antiquity. The same thought can be seen in the poet Claudian's advice to the emperor Honorius: "When you can be lcing overyourself, then you will rule rightfully over all.'' 58 An associate ofJulian's, the philosopher Iamblichus, made explicit the

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connection between the philosopher's life (vita philosophica) and the life of sexual renunciation in his biography of the ancient Greelc philosopher, Pythagoras. In the absence of any real information about the philosophel"s life, Iamblichll.s was obliged to invent episodes and attribute sayings to Pythagc;xas and his' followers to suit his own tastes and those of ·his contemporaries, and possibly also the tastes of his imperial patron. Ianiblichus's point was clear: "By their discipline arid self-control [söphrosyneJ:' he wrote, men "should become examples both to those in the households where they live, and to those in the whole community.''59 This so-called Pythagorean ideal was composed of variations of the cardinal virtues found in the Stoic and Platonic philosophers and on display in Ammianus's description of Julian. The Pythagorean ideal included a component of sexual restraint. ''And those men apparently believed it necessary to prevent births which arise contrary to nature and with violence;' he wrote. "They allowed, however, those in accord with nature and temperance [söphrosyne], which tal'e place for the purpose of temperate andlawful hegetring ofchildren.''60 Iamblichus credited the Pythagoreans with the belief that sexual activity should begin late in life, be enjoyed only infrequently, and be committed always only with the purpose of procreation in mind. 61 Any other sexual activity was mere selfindulgence, which was the opposite ofmanly self-control and from which had come all of the vices. 62 There was more to the renunciation of sex, though, than either Ammianus's praise of Julian or Iamblichus's invented lives of the early Pythagoreans might suggest, something that calls into question the manly image of sexual restraint these writers invented. It is the ancient scientific theory of the medical dangers of sex and its unhealthiness to the male body. An unmanly fear of sex pervaded later Roman culture, perhaps having to do with the increased popularization of these ancient medical notions among men of the Roman aristocracy, although such a popularization is difficult to gauge. Still, the desire to avoid the dangers that sex posed to the male body probably had as much to do with the curtailing of sexual expression in the period as did the manly pursuit of the philosopher's life. Even Julian hirnself may have shared these fears. Oribasius, a fourthcentury medical writer and court physician to Julian (and, therefore, also an associate oflamblichus ), collected a lengthy series of medical opinions for his imperial patron. Included among these opinions were some that explained the dangers of sex in clear and forcefullanguage. Oribasius, like most practitioners of ancient medicine, feit that semen was purified blood and, therefore, part of what animals and human beings needed to

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live. Far a man to expel semen thraugh ejaculatian was ta deplete his reserves af vital fluid. Accardingly, Oribasius believed that a man who en~ gaged in "continual sexual excess" would drain this vital fluid fromevery .. part of the body: ·· ·· This draining process does not stop ... so if it is constantly repeat:ed ... the result will be that all the parts of the animal (or the living' creature) are ..· drained not just of seminal fluid but also of their vital spirit.... It is hardly surprising, therefore, that those who lead a debauched life become wealc, since the purest part ofboth substances is removed from their body. As weil as this, pleasure itself can dissolve vital tension to such an extent that people have died from an excess of pleasure. We should therefore not be surprised if those who indulge moderately in the pleasures of love become wealc. 63

In sum, sexwas deadly. This was not exactly a new idea in late antiquity, and Oribasius derived much af this passage from the writings af the second-century physician Galen, who borrowed it, in turn, from earlier writers. Still, earlier writers had believed in some benefit ta sexual activity if not engaged in to excess. Not even Galen toalc his ideas as far as Oribasius did: sexual abstinence was the ideal state of health, the latter maintained, bathin warnen andin men. 64 The fifth-century medical writer ~aelius Aurelianus came ta the same conclusion: althaugh sex is natural, virginity is healthier. 65 Both philosophical and medical beliefs warlced tagether ta discourage all but the most "essential" sexual activities. The notion of the vita philosophica gave a manly justification to the abandonment of sex, but the fear of the physiological effects of sex revealed its unmanly side. It was vital that sex happened, if anly within a public context af demagraphic replacement or a private context of family continuity and the transmissian of property through inheritance. But accarding ta these beliefs, procreatian was the only virtuous form of sex (anather Staic idea papularized in late antiquity), that is, the anly form of sexthat satisfied these familial and demographic requirements, or perhaps, rather, the only form of sex warth the risk. The value placed on procreation even came through in the imperial biographies of the later empire. The authar of the HistoriaAugusta said admiringly if wishfully af Pescennius Niger that "as far intercourse with warnen, he abstained from it wholly save for the purpose af begetting children?'66 Same refused even pracreative sex after Constantine repealed the laws denying inheritances ta unmarried and childless persons. Ammianus camplained that in his day the childless and unmarried were easily the most popular individuals at Rome, he concluded, because everyone wanted to be remernbered in their wills. 67 Fears abaut sex

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may weil have played apart in the refusal by these individuals to marry or have children. THE CHANGIN_G DEFINITION OF PUDICITIA

Locatingmanliness in this procreative sexual ideal remained an important requirement, and writers of the later empire cleverly ·referred to the ideal with the andent term pudicitia (sexual modesty). In a general sense, pudicitia and its ·opposite, impudicitia (sexual immodesty), had always marked the limits of male sexuality. The pudicus (sexually modest man) acted in a sexually appropriate manner; the impudicus (sexually immodest man), in contrast, acted inappropriately. 68 Significantly, the terms had always been virtually synonymaus with manliness and unmanliness. When writers of the later Roman Empire used pudicitia and impudicitia to describe specific sexual activities, however, it becomes clear how much had changed from the classical uses of the term. What is also clear is how much the revised concept ofpudicitia resisted men's attempts to find manliness in sexual restraint. Perhaps it seems odd to characterize a sexual ideal designed to shore up the manliness of later Roman men as undermining it. To understand this point, it is important to realize that.classical Roman writers had also used the concept of pudicitia to describe women's sexual behavior, but used it in very different ways than for men. The pudica (sexually modest woman) was she who kept her virginity before marriage, reserved her sexual behavior exclusively to her husband once married, and abstained from sex in widowhood after marriage. This was the ancient Roman sexual ideal for women, an ideal that did not so much celebrate any innate goodness in women as it did successful control of women by their male guardians. Even in the early empire, when women under the age of fifty who refused to remarry were restricted in their rights of inheritance, the ideal of the woman devoted to one man (univira) remained intact. The strict ideal of pudicitia for men in the later empire defined appropriate sexual relations in exactly the same way as it had for women. In doing so, later Roman writers and legislators again obscured the distinction between men and women, integrating their roles in the arena of sexuality and contributing to the subversion of traditional notions of masculinity and the traditionalgender boundaries. The clearest example of the elimination of differences between men's and women's sexual ideals is in the area of adultery. In earlier Roman law, adultery (adulterium) was a crime only if it involved a married woman. Although both men and women could be prosecuted as adulterers, only

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the marital status of the woman had juridical significance. In other words, a married man who had sex outside of marriage was not liable. for pros(:cution under the law against adultery unless he did so with a marr.led. woman. Moreover, according to the system of patria pot;estas, adulte.ry · was primarily an offense committed agains~ the man under who~e au". thority the guilty woman lived. The old laws against adultery reinforced a woman's sexual purity within marriage, confining her se.iual expression solely to her husband, while leaving her husband's sexual conduct largely unregulated. 69 In the later Roman Empire, however, married men came to be subject to restrictions similar to those placed on married women. The beliefthat men should be bound by the same principles as women in cases of adultery actually came first from the writings of some of the Stoic philosophers of the early empire?0 It was only in the later empire, however, that this belief was translated into law. Ulpian suggested that in determining the guilt of an adulterous woman A judge ought to lceep before his eyes and to inquire into whether the husband by his own chaste life [pudice vivens] was also setring his wife an example of cultivating sound morals; for it appears the height of injustice that a hus band should demand ofhis wife a purity [pudicitia] which he does not show.-himself. 71

By the fifth century, Ulpian's opinion was considered as the equivalent of law. In this way, a woman's standard of marital sexual behavior now became a man's. Such changing standards for men's sexual behavior required a new vocabulary. Accordingly, the Latin language imported a term from Greek, moechia, to use for the broader category of extramarital sex, whether committed by a married woman or a married man, and the term moechus specifically for a married man who engaged in sex outside of his marriage. 72 A fourth-century law referred to "the disrespectful of marriage" (sacrilegi nuptiarum) perhaps as a term meant to include both husbands and wives who had sexoutside of marriage. 73 The otherwise unattested term muliercularius, from Constantine's law restricting divorce, has also been interpreted as a synonym for moechus, that is, a married man who has sex outside ofhis marriage, but its meaning is not that clear. (Again, more on this term below). Beyond the specifics · of these legal and terminological changes was a sexual ideal that bound men and women by the same moral code. The future emperor Julian wrote a panegyric to his predecessor, Constantius II, declaring on the matter of e.."ttramarital sex that "all that is forbidden to women by the laws that safeguard the legitimacy of

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offspring, your reason ever denies to your passions?'74 Julian called this attimde "the fairest exarnple of modesty [sophrosyne], not to men only but to women also?' 75 The Greelc termsöphrosynej used for the philosophical ideal of self-control, was also the usual translation for the Latin pudicitia. 76 Apparently manly reason did not only prevent men from engaging in extrarnarital sex in the later empire but also i:urtailed their traditional freedorri to exploit their hoiisehold slaves for sex. In earlier times, Roman men who owned.slaves had often made use of them for sexual purposes (including both male and female slaves, as we will discuss below). According to one classical source, sex with slaves was sex "close at hand and easlly obtairrable?'77 While the possibility of such relationships remairred legally open to men of the later Romannobility and continued in discreet practice throughout the period, it was considered a wealcness and a fault according to the rigid code of morality and its model of male pudicitia. 78 In his autobiographical poem, for exarnple, Paulinus ofPella offered this comment on sex with slaves: lest I should heap heavier offences on my faults, I checked my passions with this chastening rule: that I should never seek an unwilling victim, nor transgress another's rights, and, heedful to keep unstained my Cherished reputation, should beware ofyielding to free-bom loves though voluntarily offered, but be satis:fi.ed with servile amours in my own home; for I preferred to be guilty of a fault [culpa] rather than of a crime [crimen ], fearing to suffer loss of my good name. 79

Paulinus excluded three criminal possibilities of sexual outlet: rape, because his partner would be unwilling; adultery, because it would transgrc:ss a husband's rights; and sex with a freeborn partner, because it would darnage his own reputation, since he might be found guilty ofinfamia for seducing an unmarried person. So he engaged in sex with his household slaves. It would not darnage his reputation, he added, since he could not be found guilty of infamia because of it. He might equally have added that neither would it transgress another's rights since the slaves were from his household, nor was the consent of the slaves relevant since they were legally chatteland not persons. 80 Many Roman men may have felt the sarne way that Paulinus did. Paulinus's mention of rape as a possible outletformale sexuality deserves comment. Early Roman law had prosecuted cases of rape as a type ofinjury (iniuria). As with adultery or other offenses committed agairrst an individual under the authority of a pateifamilias, the injury was considered as inflicted agairrst the husband or father of the victim and compensation was due to him. 81 The unlawful sexual penetration ofunwill-

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ing women, as opposed to other types of assault, was specifically prohibited only from the early fourth centuiy, in a law issued by Constantin~. 82 As has been pointed out by other historians, the law did not distinguish between rape and seduction, that is, between an unwilling:pariner.anq.a· partner who was originally unwilling but whose consent was everitually obtained. 83 It has also been suggested that rather than prohibiting rape per se, the law might have been invalidating so-called abductive mar~ riages, in which the sexual act between the prospective couple circumvented the families' negotiations and possibly the families' opposition to the match. 84 If this is true, the unlawfulness of the sexual act remained, since it was committed without the consent of the woman's father. Alegal definition of rapein a later Roman contextmight be sex initiated without consent, whether that consent was the woman's or that of her paterfamilias. In any case, the issuance of this legislation and the severity of the punishments may point to an intensified awareness of rape as a serious sexual transgression by men. Men who abducted women for the purpose of sex were to be executed without possibility of appeal. 85 Even clarissimi> the men of the senatorial rank, were warned in law that whoever "would carry off a virgin [vi1lJinem rapuerit]" would suffer the sarne penalty as those oflesser rank. 86 If a man killed a rapist when proteering either himself or .il member of his family, he would be acquitted of any charge of homicide. 87 In the context of the increased social disorder of the later empire, these laws may weil have been necessary reminders of the lirnits of men's sexual behavior. (We might also note at this point a law of Constantine, which threatened with exile and lass of property a man who was given charge of an orphan girl ifthat girlwas found at the time ofher marriage nottobe a virgin. 88 ) Even if Paulinus considered the sexual use of slaves as a lesser offense than sex with an unwilling or unlawful person, his remarks also refiected the reluctant sexual use of slaves in the later empire. This reluctance is less likely related to a greater concern for the personhood of slaves than it is an appreciation for their overall value in a period of a declining agricultural population, slave revolts, and foreign raids. The jurist Paulus implied the latter view in his legal opinion: "He depreciates the value of a slave who persuades him to talce to fiight or to commit theft, or who corrupts his morals or his body. " 89 Corruption (corruptio) is the term most often used to describe sexual relations with a slave, and a term that implies darnage or spoilage of property. Corruption may also mean the devaluation of the slave simply as the result of the sexual experience. Paulus used the term elsewhere to refer to the defiowering of a female slave and the penetration of a male slave, perhaps implying the first encounter in both cases.90

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The concern for the darnage done to a slave through sex with a master, however, appears to result not only from the lesser resale value of the slave, but also from the effects on the moral atmosphere in the home. Pauhis described not önly "the hurt done to the essential quality [sub·Stantia]" of aslave u~ed for Sex but also an "overturning (eversio J of the whole hou:Sehold;'' 91 The context for his statement is unclear. It may be a reference to the blurring of the distinctions between the social classes if children were born from the union, although Roman law had long dealt with the offspring.ofmale mastc;:r-female slavesexual relationships with precision. 92 His statement is more lilcely a reference to the rupture of the marital bond, emphasized in later Roman discussions ofpudicitia. 93 lnterpreted as such, the statement accords with the greater restrictions on men's sexual behavior. Legal sources recognized the constraints that the prohibitions against sex with one's own slaves placed on the individual male, but defended these constraints nonetheless. Ulpian wrote with disdain of the master who "has acted cruelly to his slaves, or forces them into sexual impropriety [impudicitia] and a shameful violation;''94 He continued by quoting from an earlier imperiallaw that ordered slaves to be sold from such a master, a law that did not exactly support his argument: "The powers of masters over their slaves certainly ought not to be infringed and there must be no derogation from any man's legal rights. But it is in the interest of masters that those who malce just complaint be not denied relief against brutality or starvation or intolerable injury. " 95 Diocletian and Maximian maintained that even if he did not become liable for a charge of infamia, a man's reputation suffered when he used a female slave (ancilla) for sex; his fault, they added, was "an excessive Ionging for sexual pleasure [Iibido intemperatae cupiditatis];''96 Alaw ofConstantine referred to sexual unions between free men and slave women as ''unbecoming" [indigna ], although it did not forbid them. 97 Severallaws of the later empire imposed the restriction on the slaveholder that his slave "not be prostituted" (ne prostituatur), 98 and removed yet another sexual oudet for men. A close relationship existed between prostitut:ion and the sexual exploitation of slaves, since most prostitutes of both sexes were slaves owned by the men or women who ran the brothels in which they worked. 99 Exhortations similar to those against sex with slaves voiced disapproval of men who frequented prostitutes. Distaste for prostitution is evident in many of the writings of the later Roman Empire. Although prost:itution remained legal throughout the history of the empire, the author of the HistoriaAugusta claimed that the emperor Severus Alexander, a man much admired, had considered out-

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lawing it, "but he feared that such a prohibition would merely convert an evil recognized by the state into a vice practiced in private-formen when driven on by passion are more apt to demand a vice which is proh:ib~ . ited." 100 N onetheless, prostitution is described terms :of "eviP' apcl· "vice," and the moral underpinnings of thi.s description are .veiy ·much . in keeping with the more restrictive sexual morality of late antiqcity. Severus Alexander may well have investigated the possibility of criminal ~ izing prostitution, perhaps as a way of distancing hirnself from the reign of his cousin and predecessor, Elagabalus, who-if we can believe the HistoriaAugusta- both spent his free time with prostitutes and even occasionally dressedas one. 101 Instead, Severus Alexander continued to collect the tax on prostitution, as did all the Roman emperors until the sixth century. 102 For econornic purposes, at least, prostitution continued to be tolerated. Severus Alexander did enact a law erderingthat ifa female slave soldunder the ne prostituatur condition was made to serve as a prostitute, she could be immediately freed. 103 In the fifth ceritury, the Christian emperor Theodosius II extended this law, erdering any slave forced into prostitutiontobe freed. 104 Sirnilarly, he erdered that any father who prostituted his children forfeit his patria potestas over them. 105 The moral constraints on prostitution in the later empire provide the most rsliable context for the interpretation of the uncertain term muliercularius from Constantine's law restricting divorce. Remember that Constantine's law had forbidden a wife to divorce her husband for being one, a clause that implies it was considered a serious breach of marriage, although ultimately not one serious enough to initiate a divorce. The root of the term is muliercula (little woman), used occasionally for young girls as in the phrase "young boys and girls" (pueri et mulierculae) but standing by itself most often used for immoral women, especially prostitutes. A muliercularius) it seems likeliest, was a man who visited female prostitutes, unproblematic for most Roman men of the classical era and for which there existed no Latin term, but requiring a newly coined legal term in the later empire. (The same could not be said of a man whom we would consider an adulterer, which is how muliercularius is usually translated by scholars, since there already existed a term for such a man in later Latin, moechus.) 106 The legislative efforts against men's adultery, against their sex with hausehold slaves, and against their visits to prostitutes, provide proof for a remarkable shift in the Roman moral stance from earlier traditions of male sexual behavior. Even if they were never effectively enforced (and all indications seem to show that they were not), such laws represented a radical shift in acceptable sexual behavior formen. Men rnight ignore the

m.

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restrictions on their sexual behavior, but such actions were increasingly interpreted as transgressive. The ideal worked to hold men in the later Roman Empireto the same standard ofpudicitia as warnen. IMPUDICITIA AND P;EDERASTY

The·changing nature ofpudicitia in late antiquity obliged men to confront and ultimateiy to reject another of the most central features of ancient male sexuality: pederasty, or the sexual penetration of adolescent males by adult males. Traditional Roman views of male sexuality emphasized adult men's sexual roles as penetrators; more significant than the sex of their sexual partners was a respectable difference in the partners' ages. 107 We cannot know the extent to which individual preferences directed some men toward warnen alone, others toward young men alone, but the writings of the classical period assume a more-or-less equal sexual disposition toward warnen and young men. Most of the writings on sex between men and the slaves of their households that were detailed above, for example, mention both male and female slaves or refuse to mention either (recall the vague recollections of Paulinus of Pella, for example, who did not mention the sex of any of his "servile amours"). The ethic that encouraged the sexual availability of warnen, young men, and slaves ofboth sexes to adult males corresponded neatly with and probably originated in men's social dominance over these groups. 108 Still, Roman pederasty was never wholly unproblematic. Since sexual penetration defined male sexuality, tobe male and to be penetrated -even if only temporarily while an adolescent-threatened one's manliness, especially since the age at which the young man was supposed to switch from penetrated to penetrator was always vaguely defined. Roman custom dealt with this threat in irrteresring ways. Romans consistently described pederasty as a Greek practice imported into Roman culture. Perhaps the acceptability of the practice had been encouraged by cultural contact with the Greeks. lt may also have been easier for Romans to distance themselves from those aspects of the practice they regretted by describing it with Greek terms, using Greek literary models to document their feelings, or denouncing it as a Greek vice imported from the effeminate East. The Christian writer Tertullian, for example, in alludirlg to the sexual penetration endured by a slave boy, had only to mention that he was ''used as a Greek [utitur Graeco] ?'109 N onetheless, there were distinct differences between the conventions of Greek and Roman pederasty. Unlilce the Greelcs, Romans frowned upon the sexual penetration of free adolescent males, even while they permitred the penetration of male slaves. An

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attempt may even have been made to criminalize the sexual penetration of free males in the late republic with the lex Scantinia) although so little is known of the law that it is difficult to discuss it with certainty, and it parendy went mosdy unenforced. no By stigmatizing sex with free adoles.~. ··. centmales, Romans sought to guarantee that #le men who wouldbecome their future socialleaders would not be tainted by sexual passivity. Romans also denounced sexual passivity in adult males and vociferously con-. demned the men they called cinaedi ( a Greek-borrowed word), males who refused to switch from penetrated to penetrator, but denounced them with a frequency that belies the effectiveness of any prohibition. So central was this stigma of sexual passivity in adult males that it could be described simply as impudicitia in the dassical Latin sources-that is, as the opposite of what was appropriate to male sexuality.m No figure aroused more disgust because ofhis sexual passivity in late antiquity than the emperor Elagabalus, and so he is a useful starring point for our discussion of pederasty and impudicitia. Eiagabalus's biographer in the Historia Augusta vacillated between horror and titillation in a lengthy discussion ofElagabalus's desire for sexual passivity and penetration, a passivity heightened in effect by emphasizing Elagabalus's preference for sex with men with large penises: "he did nothing but send out agents t~ search for those who were 'well hung' [bene vasati] and bring them to.the palace in orderthat he rnight enjoy their vigor.''112 Or again:

a;p- ..

He made a public bath in the imperial palace and at the same time threw open the bath ofPlautianus to the populace, that by this means he might get a supply ofwell-hung men [bene vasati]. He also took care to have the whole city and the wharves searched for "mule-like men" [onobeli], as those were called who seemed particularly virile [viriliores ]. 113

Elagabalus is called impurus (impure) and obscenus (obscene) and infamis (infamous) and lu.xuriosus (voluptuous)Y 4 Over and over again, his biographers returned to the theme of his unmanly sexual desires. "He was more degenerate than any unehaste or wanton woman could ever be;' exdaimed Aurelius Victor with horror.ns These suggestions about Elagabalus' sexual behavior, however, require some darification. To begin, they are merely part of the general unmanly reputation in which Elagabalus was held (alongside his supposed cross-dressing and his championing of the use of eunuchs, as we saw in the last chapter, and his association with prostitutes, earlier in this chapter), and arenot necessarily tobe believed. Elagabalus's sexual reputation also seems to have been exaggerated over time. All that Cassius Dio (his contemporary) said of him was that he "appeared both as manly and as

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unmanly [kai gar endrizeto kai ethelyneto ], and in both relations conducted hirnself in the most licentious fashion." 116 Admittedly, not all of Cassius Dio's account ofElagabalus has been preserved, but the historian might simply. have been indicating that Elagabalus participated in sexual -activity _both as _the penetrating and penetrated partner. Indeed, Blagabalus was-linked publidy with older male companions-and was presumed, according to the- conventions of age difference,- to be the penetrated sexual part:IJ.er of these men- but was also married three times and was believed to enjoy sexual relations with these women. There is nothing in Cassius Dio's account that suggests the sexual scandal and debauchery of the later histories. Furthermore, Elagabalus was only fourteen years of age when he took the imperial throne, an appropriate age to engage in pederasty as the penetrated sex partner, even if as emperor he had a political responsibility to marry far earlier than most Roman males. But his boy.ish sexual behavior could not be reconciled with his manly imperial identity. "Who could endure an emperor who was the recipient oflust in every orifice ofhis body?" opined the author of the HistoriaAugusta long after the fact. 117 The manliness of the emperor could not be in question without challenging the linlc between political authority and masculinity. An emperor who behaved in a way that threatened his manliness could not be tolerated: Elagabalus was overthrown and assassinated after only four years as emperor. Later generations ofhistorians in turn justified his deposition and murder by magnifying the transgressive nature of his sexual behavior and gender identity, with tales of insatiable sexual passivity, fl.aunted transvestism, and open debauchery. Elagabalus was, nonetheless, no isolated instance of reputed impudicitia in a Roman emperor. The emperor Commodus was tainted with the same sort of sexual scandal as Elagabalus. Commodus "defiled every part ofhis body, even his mouth;' claimed the author of the HistoriaAugusta> "in dealings with persons of either sex?ms He was "orally and anally debauched?m9 He consorted in public with "mature and grown-up men" (puberes exoleti), again an implication that they were the sexual penetrators in their dealings with him. 120 Similar rumors circulated about the third-centuryusurper Opellius Macrinus (ruled217-218), who was said to have been ''unchaste in mouth [oris inverecundus] as well as spirit?' 121 When acclaimed emperor by the Senate, someone shouted: ''Anyone rather than the depraved one [incestum]! Anyone rather than the polluted one [impurus] !"122 Roman writers had always found such impudicitia in adult men a cause for concern. There is no reason to believe, despite one historian's attempt to convince us otherwise, that the proliferation of statements against sex-

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ual passivity represented some increase in the number of men who participated in it or their liberation from the restrairrts of the stigma attached to it. 123 N or should specific accusations be believed, especially when leveled agairrst the emperors, since such accusations had always be':n a powerfu1. ingredient of political invective and satire an~ an extremely effective way . ofdiscrediting a male rival or political opponent. 124 Particularly in the later empire, when the imperial succession was such a chaotic combination of the dynastic principle and the emperor's free choice of his successor, any man handpicked by his predecessor for the throne was open to the insinuation that hissexual favors had helped secure his place in the imperial succession.125 Still, the emperor acted as focus and exemplum for Roman masculinity generally, in sexual behavior as elsewhere, and so it should not be surprising to see the accusation of sexual passivity frequently made agairrst emperors in a period when the relationship between pederasty and the sexual manliness of its participants was in question. Behind the antipathy towards the penetrated adult male, the impudicus) lay once agairr the traditional Roman beliefin the absolute separation of masculine and feminine. Men and women should exhibit the appropriate sexual characteristics. Men should be sexually dominant, should talce pleasure in sex, and should penetrate. To be dominated sexually, to give pleasure, and to be penetrated was the province of women. To use the mal~ body as if it were a female one was to misuse it and to call into question the absolute distinction between masculine and feminine. Of course, it was precisely the absoluteness of this distinction that the changes to masculinity in the later Roman Empire had called into question. It is not surprising then that many later Roman writers evinced real anxiety about impudicitia and the impenetrability of the male body- and beyond that, about the sexual manliness of all Roman men. The Romantradition of pederasty was increasingly viewed as a violation of male pudicitia because it threatened-even temporarily-that great divide between masculine and feminine. The threat may be clarified through the example of a comment on the practice of pederasty among the barbarians. Ammianus Marcellinus described the sexual customs of the Taifali, an otherwise unlcnown group of northern barbarians who associated themselves with the Goths. He wrote: I have been told that this people of the Taifali are so sunk. in gross sensuality that among them boys couple with men in a union of unnaturallust, and waste the flower oftheir youth in the polluted embraces oftheir lovers. But if a young man catches a boar single-handed or kills a huge bear, he is exempt therefore from the contamination of this lewd intercourse. 126

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The language that Amrnianus used says much more about his feelings toward his contemporaries. within the empire than those outside it. The sexual practices he was describing were known throughout t4e Roman Empire, and he was likely as familiar with pederasty from local custom as ·'fr.om report.S about barbarians. The main difference that separated the Taifali from the inhabitants of the Roman Empire (arid we must read between the lines to appreciate this difference) w~s the manly action ofhunting that ended the sexual relationship. The Roman world had no similar endpoint to turn the boy unambiguously into a man. Roman men- a cantrast Ammianus also left uns'aid -continued such unseemly sexual effeminacy into adulthood because they were not able to prove their manliness once and for all. When the manliness of all men was in doubt, society could no Ionger afford the sexual customs that questioned the manliness of individual men. The lade of a precise endpoint to the period of adolescence when a young man might be excused for talcing a passive sexual role, the lade of a defining manly moment as Amrnianus Marcellinus suggested happened among the Taifali, meant that some Roman men of late antiquity continued to pursue sexual passivity into adulthood, depilating themselves and painting their faces to appear younger and more like boys. Elagabalus, for example, was said to have shaved and pludeed hirnself to disguise the growth of adult male body and facial hair, but he was not the only one. 127 The trouble with pederasty, in other words, was that a young man might not know when to stop. Commodus, who was nineteen years of age when he took the throne, no Ionger had the excuse of age for hissexual passivity (and was also eventually assassinated). The bigger problern of manliness lay behind the problern of pederasty, as the examples of Elagabalus and Commodus and of many others brought into unpleasant focus. Sexual passivity in maleswas also the subject of satire in late antiquity. The poet Ausorlius devoted a series of epigrams to the shame of the impudicus, using fellatio as a particularly strong point of ridicule. 128 In one poem, a man sucks his wife's fingers so that he rrlight not rrliss any opportunity to practice performing the action. 129 (Note the taleen-forgranted bisexuality, which has the man married and still enjoying sex with males.) In another, Ausorlius spelled out in Greek the action that he accused a man of doing-"he licks [leichei]"-adding coyly that "it is not seemly that I should say such a nasty thing in Latin;"130 (Again, note the implication that the sexual morality of the Greeks would perrrlit such a mention). Several of his poems hinge on the malodoraus breath of the man who enjoys oral sex. 131 There is nothing particularly new in Auso-

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nius's satire: Roman poets had made artistic use ofthe same cultural discomfort with sexual passivity in meri for centuries. What can be seen for the first time in the later empire, however, is: an .. attempt to translate the social sanctions against maie ·impudicitia i.ö.to.le- · gal prohibitions. In the judicial opinion of Ulpian, for examph!, mih ; "whose body has been opened like a woman's" was guilty of infamia> that legal category of unmanliness. 132 In the opinion o{Paulus, no male should enduresexual penetration for any reason, even the threat of death, because "for decent men a fear of this kind ought to be worse than the fear of death." 133 Paulus might also have suggested that any man who had submitred sexually to another should have half of his goods confiscated. 134 These legal opinions gradually became codified as law in late antiquity. The anxiety surrounding sexual passivity in men in the later empire also meant that for the first time the legal and social sanctions against impudicitia in men were extended to the active partner, who despite his manly penetration, participated in the feminizadon of his partner. The penetration of unwilling males was punishable by death from at least the beginning of the third century. 135 A fourth -century irnperiallaw similarly denounced men "who have the shameful custom of condemning a man's body, acting the part of a woman's, to the sufferance of an alien sex;' and exacte~ the death penalty. 136 This law, though, did not specify that the penetrated partner had to be unwilling. An epigram of Ausonius, although intended as satire and not as legislation, made the same point:

a

"Three men are in a bed together: two are committing sexual misconduct [stuprum] and two are having sexual misconduct committed against them?' "I think that malces four?' "You are wrong: give the ones on either side a single offense [crimen] and the one who is in the middle two, because he is doing it and having it done to him?'137

Stuprum was the ancient term for any unlawful type of sexual misconduct. Ausonius used it herein an active sense (stuprum committunt, "they are committing sexual misconduct") when it involved the action of the penetrating partners, and used it in a passive sense to refer to the penetrated partners (stuprum perpaiuntur, "they are having sexual misconduct committed against them;' or "they are undergoing sexual misconduct"). Buthe described both as offenses (crimina). Legaldefinitions ofstuprum began specifically to include the unlawful sexual penetration of males alongside the unlawful penetration of women. 138 The intended result is obvious: to shore up an eroding masculine identity with new and wider prohibitions against sexual passivity in males. In narrowing the field of activities included within the realm of pudicitia>

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however, the same writers who sought to present their ideal of sexuality as manly, seeing it as self:.restraint, contributed to a new and unmanly restriction of men's sexual freedoms by widerring the field of transgressive sexuality.In pärticular, the shili: in attitudes toward pederasty in the later empire me;int that the adult, penetrating partners in pederastic relationships also ca:me into disrepute. Such a shili: of attitudes is apparent in descriptions of the sexual encounters of emperors in the imperial biographies. Cassius Dio's idealized depiction of the emperor Trajan (ruled 97-117), for example, required this half-hearted apology: I know, of course, that he was devoted to boys and to wine, but if he had

ever committed or endured any base or wicked deed as the result of this, he would have incurred censure; as it was, however, he dranl~: all the wine he wanted, yet remained sober, and in his relations with boys he harmed no one. 139 Both actions were minimized. A century and a half later, though, historian Aurelius Victor admitted to Trajan's fondness for wine in apologetic tones but passed over in complete silence his pederastic pursuits. 140 Perhaps such behavior could no longer be dismissed as easily in the fourth century as it had been in the third. Trajan's successor Hadrian (ruled 117-138), whom Cassius Dio praised at length, was criticized in the HistoriaAugusta for his "excessive lust [nimia voluptas]:' including his relationship with the young man Antinous. 141 Perhaps because of the seeming incongruity between Hadrian's manly martial abilities and the unmanliness ofhis pederastic involvements, Aurelius Victor dismissedas "evil gossip [rumores mali]" the notion of a sexual relationship between him and Antinous. 142 Examples of the denunciation of adult pederasts by later Roman writers abound. The emperor Carinus was a "frequent corruptor of youth [frequens corruptor iuventutis ]:' which the author of the Historia Augusta defined as the "evil use of the enjoyment ofhis own sex.''143 The poet Ausonius offered the opinion that if the transmigration of souls truly existed, a pederast deserved to be reincarnated as a bug (a dung beetle, in fact, malcing a witty allusion to the enjoyment of anal sex). 144 Attempts were also made to criminalize or recriminalize pederasty beginning in the third century. As the jurist Paulus wrote: Anyone who debauches a boy under the age of seventeen, or commits any other outrage on him, whether he is abducted by him or by a corrupt companion; or who solicits a woman or a girl, or does anything for the purpose of corrupting their chastity, or offers his house for that purpose, or gives

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them any reward in order to persuade them, and the crime is consummated, shall be punished with death; if it is not consunimated, he· shall be deported to an island, and his profl.igate accomplices shall suffer the extreme penalt:y. 14~

After a long absence, moreover, references to the Iex Scanti~ia begin. ag.Jri to appear in the sources. 146 Some later Roman poets continued to describe the beauty of the aciolescent male. Yet even they shared with their contemporaries an amciety about the manliness of such attraction and its connection to a discredited form of sexual desire. The poet Claudian dedicated a panegyric to the young emperor Honorius. "The women ofRome never tire of gazing at those blooming cheeks:' he declared, "those crowned locks, those limbs clothed in the consul's jasper-studded robes, those mighty shoulders, and that neck, beauteous as Bacchus' own, with its necldaces ofRed Sea emeralds. " 147 Even while Claudian as poet recognized the beauty ofthe emperor, and even while he compared his appearance with that of the youthful (and sexually ambiguous) god Bacchus, he nonetheless attributed the ionging solely to "the women ofRome:' Roughly the samethingwas said of the young Maximinus (ruled 235-238) by the author of the Historia Augusta: "He hirnself was so beautiful that the more wanton of women loved !Vm indiscriminately, and not a few desired to be gotten with child by hini:'148 A similar discomfort with the adult male's appreciation for youthful male beauty may be found in an anonymous poem once attributed to Ausonius. The poet suggested to a nameless youth that "while nature was deciding whether to malce you a boy or a girl, beautiful one, you were made a boy who is almost a girl:' 149 The poetwas rescued from the implication of pederasty because the object ofhis affections was only ambiguously male. The poet's desire is further disguised and yet further admitted with the phrase paene puella puer (a boy who is almost a girl), since in late ancient Latin it would have been a virtual homonym for pene puella puer (a boy who is a girl with a penis ). In his poetry, Ausonius addressed a boy as ''Adonis" and "Ganymede," traditional ideals of youthful beauty and both associated in pagan myth with pederasty, and alluded tothat age when the object ofhis affection "seem[ ed] either a boy or a girl:' 150 Ausonius's poems on the beauty of N arcissus (another mythical ideal of youthful male beauty who feil in love with his own reß.ection in water) have a similar tone: one included the female figure of Echo who feil in Iove with N arcissus, but the other two imagined a male admirer who gazed at N arcissus in the same way he gazed at hirnself 151 Pederastic desire seems still to have existed in adult men, but they were no Ionger able to act on it with impunity.

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The reformulation of male pudicitia in the later empire virtually necessitated the abandonment of any sexual relationships between males as failings, regardless of the age of the participants or the type of sexual activity enjoyed. The poet Nemesianus represented the end of a tradition · when he described two shepherds who compared their loves: one for "the beautiful girl Meroe" (Meroe formosa) a:nd the other for "the beautiful boy Iollas" (formosus Iollasi as "the same passion for different· sexes." 152 No other statements .about pederasty in late antiquity share the positive perspective ofNemesianus. Even themedical beliefs oflate antiquityworked to give added weight to these fears. The physician Oribasius wrote that sex between males was morevigoraus and more tiring than sex between a man and a woman and should be more avoided to preserve the body's health. 153 Ifprocreative sex could be excused or risked because of familial or demographic obligations, sex between boys and men had no such justification. The results of the later Roman sexual code are straightforward. Both adult and adolescent participants in pederastic relationships were condemned. The ancient dichotomy in classical sexuality between penetrated males who were stigmatized and penetrating males who were not-emphasized in recent secondary Iiterature on ancient homosexuality as not really being homosexuality at all-was largely abandoned in late antiquity in favor of a condemnation ofboth roles as unmanly. A new vocabulary of sexual vice appeared, using terms like stuprum cum masculo (sexual misconduct with a[nother] male) that did not distinguish between active and passive roles in homosexual sex but subjected both to censure and legal impediments. 154 In sum, the later Romannotion ofpudicitia required men not only to keep their bodies free from penetration but also to refrain from a whole series of penetrative acts not previously sanctioned: with young men, with slaves and prostitutes of both sexes, and with warnen other than their wives. An individual man wanting to preserve his manliness, wanting to be a pudicus, was still required to act only as a sexual penetrator, but only with his wife. In turn, an impudicus was not merely a man guilty of sexual passivity with another male but a man tainted by any sort of sexual impropriety. Indeed, sexual desires of all sorts were suspect. Already at the end of the second century, Marcus Aurelius had written that "sins of desire, in which pleasure predominates, indicate a moreself-indulgent and womanish [thelyteros] disposition?' 155 Later Roman writers returned repeatedly to this theme, exhorting men to :fl.ee from sexual desire generally as from "a beast, operring its capacious jaws?n56 Physiognomie portrayals of the deformed bodies of oversexed men (called inverecundi, "the

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inunodest;' or libidinosi) "the lustful") demonstrated what could happen if men ignored these warnings. 157 · By exhorting men to rise above their physical natures and bodilyde-. •· sires, later Roman writers affered men an opportunity to exercise g:teat~r · self-control in their very bodies and thus to demonstrate their TJirtus.· Even while the stricter sexual attitudes were translated into the ancient gendered language of manliness and unmanliness, however, ·i:he distinctions between men's and women's sexual roles were becoming blurred by the integration of the pudicitia of both sexes. Warnen were still expected to serve as passive sexual recipients of men's desires, to be sure, and men were still considered to function as sexual agents. Nonetheless, men were judged by a feminine Standard of sexual restraint and sexual exclusivity, hardly a manly thing at all. THE SEXUALITY OF EUNUCHS

Eunuchs performed useful functions in the later Roman hauseholdtheir numbers and cost would seem to indicate something of the sortbut they also provoked great anxiety in the household, particularly in the realm of sexuality. Eunuchs served as reminders of two of the greatest probleiifS of men's sexuality in the later empire: their control ofwomen and their control of themselves. Once again, eunuchs embodied the great changes talcing place in Roman masculinity. In Roman households, as in eastern Mediterranean households, eunuchs performed a variety of domestic tasks. Foremost among these tasks was the guardianship of warnen and children. The eunuch's supposed inability to engage in penetrative sex made them eminently suitable for protecting the pudicitia of such persons. The poet Claudian called the eunuch's ability of safeguarding the chastity of a man's wife and children his "sole virtue" or "one manly quality" (unica TJirtus). 158 Cassius Dio related with horror an incident in which an early third-century prefect had had over one hundred men castrated, but this measure had been taken so that his virgin daughterwould be above reproach in allher dealings with these men, who wereher attendants and teachers. 159 .As a child, the future emperor Julian's tutor had been a eunuch, a Scythian slave who had also taught his mother. 160 So removed were eunuchs from the sexuality of men in some eyes that warnen apparently felt no embarrassment at including them in the most intimate of surroundings. The Christian Jerome criticized the practice by which warnen might bathe tagether with eunuchs, because the latter still have "men's feelings" (animi virorum ), but he was stricter than most, and

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also felt that Christian virgins should not even see themselves naked. 161 In order to humiliate Eutropius, the eunuch consul, the poet Claudian reminded his readers of some of the man's former domestic duties, duties · : that describe certain intimacies between eunuchs and women (even ifwe · ·canilot be c.ertain that EJJ-tropius had ever really performed such duties): and so the future consul and governor of the Bast would comb bis mistress' locks or stand niliced holding a silver vessel wherein bis charge could wash herself. And whert overcome by the heat she threw herself upon the couch, there would stand this patrician fanning her with bright peacock feathers.l62

Because of the familiarity of eunuchs with women's bodies, they might be called upon to act as investigators of the virginity of potential brides, a custom about which the Christian Lactantius also complained. 163 Even as eunuchs were intended to guard the sexual integrity ofwomen on behalf of the men of the household, however, they also gave women a new degree of independence. In the ancient Roman world, a woman of the upper classes was not permitred to travel in public except in the presence of men, but for reasons of female pudicitia the only men with whom she might associate were her relatives. A noblewoman's eunuch slaves provided public transportation, acting as her porters and carrying her in sedan chairs whenever she traveled in public, allowing her to travel without her male relatives. 164 At the time when the laws were granring greater freedoms to women to act independently in the arrangement of their affairs, eunuch slaves were providing the material basis to mal~e such independence possible. The assignment of eunuchs as personal slaves to women also assumed that castrated men could not engage in sexual activity: an unreliable assumption and the basis for much male anxiety. Some eunuchs continued to have sexual desires, as Jerome complained above_ Some might even act on those sexual desires, he added elsewhere; for that reason it was best that women not associate themselves with eunuchs, "so as to give no occasion to evil tongues?'165 Claudian slandered Eutropius in much the same way, calling him his mistress's nutritor, a word presumably of his own design meaning roughly a male wet nurse. 166 Claudian's point was to ridicule Eutropius's former physical intimacy with a woman, like that between a wet nurse and her ward, but left unsaid what sort of intimacy they had enjoyed. The third-century Christian writer Tertullian made this accusation agairrst the women of his day: "A great many of them, even those of noble birth and blessed with wealth, unite themselves promiscuously with mean and base-born men whom they have found able to

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gratify their passions or who have been mutilated for purposes oflust?' 167 And although it does notmention eunuchs by name, a law ofConstantine threatened the severest punishments for a noblewoman who w~s · found tobe having sex with one ofher male slaves (she wastobe st:dpped of allher possessions and exiled; he was to be lcilled). 168 In short, sex be- ·· tween warnen and eunuchs was always possible. Eunu~s with penises · intact might still achieve erections and engage in penetrative sex without the worry ofimpregnating the warnen in their charge. Even eunuchs unable to engage in penetrative sex could give sexual pleasure to warnen in non-penetrative ways such as in cunnilingus. Cunnilingus was an unmanly sexual activity from a traditional Roman perspective, because a man gave sexual pleasure instead of received it, but eunuchs had no manly reputation to preserve. The unmanliness of eunuchs also meant that they were presumed to have no ability to restrain themselves from all kinds of sexual vice-but then, neither did the warnen. . The intimacy between warnen and eunuchs and the ability of eunuchs to move about in public as weil as in the women's quarters in the Roman hausehold meant that eunuchs could also act as go-betweens on behalfof married warnen seelcing sexual affairs with other men. In his description ofEutropius's career, Claudian asserted that the eunuch-consul had excelled ll Jerome took the opportunity to rail against the men ofhis day, perhaps intending it in part as a lesson for Oceanus and other male readers of his letter. ''Among the Romans men's unchastity goes unchecked;' he exclaimed; "seduction and adultery are condemned, but free permission is given to lust to range the

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brothels and to have slave girls." But "the laws ofCaesar aredifferent from the laws of Christ:' Jerome continued, "Papinian commands one thing, our Paul another?' In sexual matters, "with us whatis unlawful for women is equally unlawful for men, and as both sexes serve God they are bound by the same conditions?' 12 In other words, even while some Roman moralists and legislators worried about the collapsing distinctions between men's and women's sexual roles, Jerome demonstrates-and other Christian writers voiced the same sentiment-that Christians were unconcerned about the gender ambiguity involved in assimilating men's and women's sexual virtue. Indeed, Jerome freely admitted that both sexes were held to the same standard. Likewise, Jerome worried about the disturbances of domestic life caused by promiscuous husbands and freewheeling widows, as other moralists oflate antiquity did. But he did not seem concerned that Fabiola had escaped the control of men by refusing to remarry; indeed, he praised her widowhood and characterized as harmonious a peculiar unmarried relationship between her and Pammachius. Different criteria were obviously being used in Christian writers' approvals and criticisms, criteria that I will attempt to illurninate in this chapter. In terms of actual sexual transgressions for men, Christians seem to have added little to the opinions already circulating in late antiquity. The extent to which the Christians accommodated themselves to existing Roman sexual attitudes may seem surprising to modern readers, since the Christian code of sexual morality, once formulated, often cut squarely agairrst the grairr of the cultural attitudes of later societies, but this accommodation can be easily demonstrated. Christian definitions of and opposition to adultery is a good example. All extant Latin Christian writers who wrote on the subject of adultery, from Tertullian on, condemned it. ''All things are held in common among Tertullian said about his fellow Christians, "except our wives?m Christian writers also firmly believed that married men were bound by the same restrictions as married women. Hippolytus declared that "if any man has a wife, or a woman has a man, they should be taught to be content, the man with the woman and the woman with the man." 14 Christians themselves noted the conjunction of pagan and Christian attitudes on this subject but included adultery among those offenses that met with universal disapproval. 15 Christian writers also held that divine command as well as human law condemned adultery. Salvian used Biblical justification, for example, to argue that "the Lord said that the lewd glances of the lusting man do not fall short of the crime of adultery?' 16 But although both Jesus and Paul were remernbered as having spoken agairrst adultery,

us:'

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neither of their statementswas detailed or precise, and it is unclear the extent to which the earliest Christian tradition required an interpretation of adultery in anything other than the traditional Roman sense of sex with a married woman. 17 The anonymaus late ancient Christian writer identified as Ambrosiaster expressly recognized this limitation on the meaning of the Biblical passages on adultery, although he also rejected extramarital sexual affairs for men. 18 · Despite the uncertain Biblical precedent, Christian moralists clearly wanted the prohibition against adultery to limit married men's sexual behavior to their wives and not merely to limit married women's sexual behavior to their husbands. Accordingly, they appealed to reason and emotion as well as Scripture in their argument. Lactantius said to husbands that "it is evil to exact that which you yourself are not able to exhibit" and even suggested that "when a wife falls into such a marriage, aroused by the very example, she thinks that she should either irnitate it or get revenge."19 Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine also all condemned married men's as well as women's extramaritat sexual relationships. Ambrose, for example, said that "every kind of sexual offense [stuprum] is adultery, and what is not appropriate to the woman is not appropriate to the man;''20 The constant repetition of this clarification suggests that the Church fathers themselves were aware of the limited Biblical support for their opinions and feit it necessary to rely on other methods for preventing Christian men from engaging in what they might not otherwise have considered sinful. Christian prohibitions against men's sexual use of slaves, either within their own hausehold or by consorting with prostitutes, follow the same pattern. There were not really any suitable Biblical precedents for such prohibitions, except in Paul's briefcondemnations ofpornoi. The word referred to those who engaged in porneia, which sometimes meant "sexual offenses" broadly conceived but which more often meant "prostitution" in classical sources; Paul might well have meant "persons involved in prostitution:' but more likely prostitutes or panderers rather than frequenters of prostitutes. Jerome, perhaps recognizing this ambiguity in his Latin translation of Paul's writings, translated the term as adulteri, "men who have sex with married women:' in one passage, and as fornicarii, "men who frequent brothels:' in another. 21 So Christian writers again preferred rational argument to Biblical prohibitions to make their point. Salvian of Marseilles complained that "the mother of the house is not far removed from the lowliness offemale slaves when the father of the house is the husband of slaves;''22 Again, these arguments may well have taken place in the context of men's ignorance that these were supposed to

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have been considered as sins. Recall, for example, Paulinus ofPella's adrnission that he was "satisfied with servile amours in my own home; for I preferred to be guilty of a fault rather than a crime?'23 Lilce their pagan counterparts, Christian intellectuals were trying to persuade men to adopt a new and more rigorous code of sexual restraint. Ambrose, conderrming men who had sex with prostitutes, specifically rejected the suggestion-perhaps commonly made by men opposing a more rigid sexual morality-that it was only naturalthat men would seek outlets for their sexual drives. 24 Jerome, too, declared that no man should "deny that there is a lustful sacrilege" ifhe had "violated the members of Christ and the living sacrifice that is pleasing to God through shameful impurities with the victims of public lust;' that is, ifhe had enjoyed sex with prostitutes. 25 But it may be that some Christian men were refusing to accept as sinful exactly what Jerome insisted was sinful. A final example of the confluence between Christian and pagan sexual morality in late antiquity can be found in Christian opposition to sex between males. Christians probably had clearer Biblical precedents here for their condemnations, from Paul's lists of sexual offenders that included "effeminate men" (malakoi) the Greek equivalent of the Latin molles) and "males who lie down with males" (arsenokoitai) translated into Latin as masculorum concubitores). 26 The juxtaposed terms seem to indicate a condemnation of both the male who penetrates and the male who is penetrated, but the precise meaning of both terms is uncertain. The Biblical legend of Sodom also provided a lirnited basis for the condemnation of the penetrating male (since the sin of Sodom was already interpreted by some in late antiquity to have been a sexual one, and the Sodornites were thought to have wanted to penetrate the strangers and not be penetrated by them). 27 But Christian moralists seldom made use of these Biblical precedents in their condemnations of sex between males, which may reflect their own uncertainty about the interpretation of these passages. Instead, they resorted to a typical Roman rhetoric of the violation of nature. An anonymaus late ancient Christian poet attributed any sexual desires between males to the intervention in human affairs of the Devil, who induced men "to transgress nature's covenants, and stain pure bodies, manly sex, with an embrace unnamable, and uses ferninine?' 28 Novatian described how sex between males resulted in "uncommon and fearsome monstrosities against nature itself frommen through men?' 29 The nature that men violated through sexual relations with each other was not human nature but masculine nature, by blurring the distinctions between masculine and feminine sexual behavior. Salvian of Marseilles ridiculed the ancient beliefthat it was part of manly sexual aggression to

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penetrate another male, calling it folly that men "who subdued men to the worst infamy of feminine use believed that they were possessors of great manly strength." He continued sarcastically, "Since they were brave men, they could change men into women! How criminal this was!" 30 Again, we cannot know how many of their contemporaries shared their views and how many disputed them: Salvian's comments seem pointed toward an opposing opinion. But Christian leaders made a point of using the familiar horrific rhetoric of the penetrated male and attaching the same horror to the penetrating male in their blanket condemnation of sexual behavior between males. They, like pagan moralists, condemned the actions of both men involved in sexual encounters between males. Cyprian denounced the men whom "with frenzied lusts rush against men;' intending apparently to rebuke the penetrating partner. 31 There are vestiges of an older morality on male sexual behavior. In an odd set of treatises on lying, Augustine argued that for a man to swear falsely was worse than for him to be penetrated by another man. 32 Augustine's argument o.nly made sense if the sexual penetration of a man was thought so horrific that it seemed counterintuitive to assert that lying was worse, and Augustine obviously assumed that the disgust at the thought that an adult male wanted or permitred hirnself to be penetrated sexually was sufficient to drive home his point. In general, though, Christian moralists continued the blurring of the distinction in male sexual relationships between active and passive roles and lumped both together as sin. The condemnation of male sexual immorality along familiar lines was part of a larger Christian rhetorical strategy. The preference for arguments from reason and emotion and nature instead ofBiblical citations was not o.nly because of the obliqueness of the Biblical texts but also because Christian writers sought to persuade their audience by appealing to existing perceptions of right and wrong. We should not believe that Christian moralists were coldly calculating popular response to their ideas; they doubtless held these beliefs sincerely. Rather, they used the attitudes of contemporary moralists to demonstrate the similarities between the Christian sexual code and the code of sexual self-restraint already encouraged in late antiquity and thus to associate themselves with what they considered the best of the Roman heritage. The appeal to common understandings can be seen, for example, in the Christian denunciations of the immorality of the emperors, which are entirely remi.niscent ofthe denunciations ofthe Roman histories. Nero was "inflamed by an excess of every vice;' Hadrian dishonored his companion Antinous "in the imperial embrace" and "robbed him of his manhood;' Elagabalus "defiled the innermost sanctum of the Augustan seat" (also a play on

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words that alluded to his preference for asswning the penetrated sexual role ), and Maximian directed hirnself "not only to the corruption of young men, an odious and detestable thing, but also to the violation of the daughters of the leading citizens?'33 Even if Christians adopted the later Roman sexual morality as they inherited it, though, they attributed this morality to the teachings of their religion. Again, this attribution was part of a larger strategy, because it enabled Christian writers to criticize the earlier sexual customs ofRome and even to associate these customs with unmanliness, something pagan writers were unwilling to do. Accordingly, Christian writers were able to initiate a larger critique of pagan culture through their discussions of sexual morality. Already at the beginning of the third century, for example, Tertullian attempted to undermine the wisdom of Greek philosophy by calling Socrates "a corruptor ofyouth" (corruptor adulescentium). It was true insofar as it was the reason Socrates had been condeqmed to death and shows Tertullian's knowledge of the classical heritage. But Tertullian meant to draw attention to Socrates' enjoyment of Greek pederasty in using the phrase, which is clear from his cantrast between Socrates and what he claimed was a typical Christian man -one who "confines hirnself to the female sex?'34 Pagan intellectuals oflate antiquity never made a similar Statement, even those who condemned sex between males; they were tied too closely to the ancient Greek and Roman cultural heritage to be able to formulate so hostile an assessment. In contrast, Christian writers were more easily able to dismiss the pagan and classical foundations of late ancient culture, because they had at their disposal an alternative cultural tradition in the Biblical heritage, even if they did not make much use of the actual content of the Biblical heritage in creating that sexual code. Through their condemnations, we see another aspect of the importance ofChristian ideology in late antiquity, as a means for escaping the intellectual constraints of the classical heritage. Christian ideology permitred Christians to break with the past in a way that was impossible for pagans. Above all, this cantrast is evident in the Christian denunciation of the sexual immorality of the traditional Roman gods, a double vituperation of the paganism itself as well as of earlier sexual customs. Jupiter "held the wretched Ganymede in hisfoul embrace;' in the words ofPrudentius. 35 "I make no mention of the virgins he defiled;' began Lactantius on the same subject, "but I cannot pass over ... [what] he spoiled with dishonor and infamy;' which Lactantius considered "a deed of consummate impiety and wickedness, his rape and outrage of the royal son;' and a "true spoilage which is committed against nature?' Lactantius concluded the following about the myth ofJupiter and Ganymede: "For what other

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purpose is the eagle worshipped in the temples of Jupiter, except that the memory of the wicked crime and outrage might remain forever?" 36 Jupiter was not the only god to be tainted with such sexual vice. Hercules was also "notorious for his love of an effeminate boy [nwllis puer];''37 Bacchus "was a pervert [cinaedus] and served the lustful desires ofhis lovers" with "his halfmen [semiviri] friends, his associates in debauchery, shame, and lust." 38 And Apollo, who "was in love with a beautiful boy, violated him?' 39 The need for such a Christian denunciation was muted over the course of the fourth century, as paganism declined in importance and was eventually outlawed. But even at the beginning of the fifth century, Augustine still criticized the immorality of the pagan gods in The City ofGod. Jupiter was "a seducer of the wives of others, and a shameless lover and ravisher of a beautiful boy?'40 In the same work, he complained that classicalliterature still "excited the base passions of young men by portraying the disgraces fflagitia] ofJupiter?'41 In general, and because of such depictions of sexual vice in the myths of paganism, Christian men feit a real ambivalence about reading classical Latin literature. Most of the Christian writers of late antiquity were educated in the classical texts, knew them weil, and even imitated their style (recall, for example, Ambrose's redaction of Cicero's De officiis mentioned in chapter 5 ). They also worried about the corrupting influence of classicalliterature. Jerome, for example, promised to God never again to read a pagan text after receiving a vision from a sickbed in which God accused him of being more a Ciceroman than a Christian. Nonetheless, Jerome continued to sprinkle quotations from and allusions to classical texts throughout his letters; a discrepancy that a rival eventually pointed out to himY His ambivalence is painfully clear. The problern with such literature, the fourth-century polemicist Firmicus Matemus suggested, was that men used the legends of the pagan gods to justify their own immoral actions. He described this tendency in a passage dripping with sarcasm: Another person is fond of the embraces of boys: weil, let him look for Ganymede in Jupiter's bosom, let him see Hercules questing after Hylas with the impatience of love, let him learn how Apollo was overcome with desire for Hyacinthus ... so that he may declare that his gods authorize him to do whatever is today most severely punished by the laws of Rome.... If someone acts passively like a woman or seeks solace in an effeminate body, let him see that Liber [Bacchus] is rewarded by his lover even after death with favors of promised passion in imitation of shameful intercourse.... For those wishing to commit incest the example ofJove

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should be taken up, since he slept with bis mother, married bis sister, and so that he might complete the whole repertoire of incest, that corrupter of persons even made advances toward bis daughter. 43

The cantrast between the sexual immorality exhibited in ancient myths and what was encouraged by contemporary moral Standards also served to differentiate neatly Christian from pagan culture. (Firmicus was a former pagan astrologer himself, who became a Christian and then ridiculed his former pagan beliefs ). The repeated comparison of pagan belief to prostitutionalso reinforced the connection between the traditional religionsandsexual vice. 44 The real importance of Christian ideology lay not so much in the denunciation of specific sexual activities but in changing the moral significance of sexual acts. The ancient myths and classicalliterature of the pagans continually reminded everyone that men had not al~ays been so sexually restrainedas their moralists told them they should be. But Christians, who viewed such traditions as nothing more than a heritage of sexual sin, could forge a new masculine identity removed from the sexual behavior of the ancients. "The laws of Caesar are different frpm the laws of Christ," Jerome said, merely adapting an earlier and more farnaus dictum ofTertullian: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"45 The heritage of pagan sexual transgression functioned for Christian writers as a symbol of the need for a total cultural transformation.

THE MANLINESS OF SEXUAL RENUNCIATION

Christian leaders encouraged the code of male sexual restraint not only as a sign ofChristian conviction but also as a sign of manliness. They did not rely on ancient medical beliefs in the dangers of sex to enforce the code but on Christian theological beliefs in sex as sin, and in this way they avoided the trap of unmanliness. They turned male sexual renunciation into a heroic act and created an intellectual environment in which men might abandon sex and its dangers without jeopardizing their masculine identity. An excellent example of the Christian reformulation of male sexual renunciation can be found in the funerary portrait of the emperor Valentinian li, delivered by Ambrose ofMilan in 392 (and serves as a nice comparison with the depiction of the emperor Julian by the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus, written about the sametime and used as an example of pagan sexual renunciation, in chapter 3 ). It may seem odd to find Ambrose lavishing praise upon this emperor, given his numerous struggles against

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him and against the authority of the state in general, but this incongruity merely highlights the stylized nature of the oration. Once Valentinian was dead, Ambrose could safely depict him as he wished he had been. Ambrose began his funeral speech in a typically panegyric way, idealizing all aspects of the emperor's life and reign. He was courageaus in war; his subjects loved him dearly. Ambrose glossed over Valentinian's Arian Christian upbringing and the fact that he died unbaptized and instead emphasized the restrictions that Valentinian placed on paganism as a sign of the sincerity of his Chrisrianity. 46 Ambrose even suggested that Valentinian was like Christ, by means of a quirky argument, in that Valentinian appeared to Ambrose as "a bright and ruddy youth;' and therefore not unlilce the Biblical description of the bridegroom of the Song of Songs.47 These descriptions all echoed the extravagant praise of pagan panegyrics, but with adefinite Christian twist. Whenever Ambrose commented upon Valentinian's sexual behavior, both this Christian component and the artificial nature of the text become clear. Ambrose conceded that a typical young man was "unwilling to offer the neck of his mind to the yoke" of sexual restraint and submit to "the burdens of discipline, the rigor of amendment, the weight of abstinence and the curbing of lust;' but maintained that Valentinian easily accepted such things happily. 48 To emphasize his point, he related a tale of a beautiful actress whom the young emperor had brought to court, only to see all ofhis young companions falllustfully enthralled to her. But Valentinian "never gazed at her or saw her;' according to Ambrose, so that "he might teach the youths to refrain from the love of a woman whom he himself, who could have kept her in his power, had spurned.'' Ambrose concluded that "he thus gave proof ofhis chastity;' adding that "who is so much a master of a servant as he was ofhis own body?"49 When he described Valentinian's marriage, Ambrose made obvious again the elegiac nature of the speech. The emperor deferred his marriage as long as he could, Ambrose avowed, enjoying only the pious and chaste love of his sisters. 50 When the necessities of state obliged him to marry, he became a model husband, "chaste in body, who had no intercourse with any woman other than his wife.'' 51 Insofar as Valentinian TI bore any resemblance to the figure portrayed in Ambrose's oration, he lived according to the sexual ideals held by both pagan and Christian moralists in late antiquity. Ambrose, who lcnew weil how to manipulate the image of manliness, said ofValentinian that "he died a veteran in the campaigns of virtue [virtus ];' evolcing with these words the martial identity that Roman man so admired and linlcing it to sexual restraint. 52 The manliness of sexual re-

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nunciation was an assertion that carried obvious appeal, and Christian writers skillfully deployed gendered rhetoric in support of their ideals of male sexuality. But Christian writers had another rhetorical device in their armory, a device they also used in military and political tropes, as we have seen in the last two chapters, and that was the paradox of apparent unmanliness. Let me give an example before I explain further. When Ambrose gave a funeral address for his brother Satyrus in 3 79, he did not link sexual restraint to a military manliness, as he did for Valentinian II. lnstead, he attributed to hisbrother (who never married) a sexual modesty more reminiscent of ideals for warnen rather than for men. He said of Satyrus: if perchance he had ... met some female relative, he was as it were bowed down and sunlc to the earth, though he was not different in company with men, he seldom lifted up his face, raised his eyes, or spoke; whenhe did one of these things, it was with a lcind ofbashful modesty of mind [p~dico mentis pudore], with which, too, the chastity of his body [castimonia corporis] agreed. 53

His brother's demeanor was not an effeminate one, despite:its similarity with women's. Rather, it represented the "foundations of manliness" (fundamenta virtutis), according to Ambrose. His was a manly modesty. Finding manliness in sexual modesty was only possible because of the differing beliefs of pagans and Christians about the origins of sexual desire. Pagan writers relied on the ancient medical perspective that tied sexual desire to the heat of the male body and sexual exertion as diminishing that heat and draining the energy of the male body. Christian writers apparently also accepted this medical perspective. Jerome, for example, wrote of one man that "the natural heat of the body fights against his fixed purpose" of sexual renunciation, and Ambrose bemoaned the fact that men, "being warm with the natural heat of the body and inflamed beyond the measure of nature by the heat of wine:' are often unable to "restrain themselves, and are excited to bestial passions."54 Nonetheless, Christian writers overwhelmingly preferred a theological to a medical terminology for discussing both the nature and origin of sexual desire (or lust, both terms being acceptable translations of the seemingly interchangeable Latin terms Iibido and concupiscentia). 55 Christians borrowed from and extrapolated upon a Biblical perspective of the place of lust in men's lives, especially through an interpretation of the fall of humanity and the origin of sin from the first chapters of the book of Genesis. Christian writers managed to construct a framework for understanding sexual desire as the result ofhuman frailty rather than

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its cause) as the medical perspective had insisted. Sexual restraint was not the fear of weakness but its undoing. The champion of the link between lust and the fall of humanity was Augustine of Hippo, and the ideas that filled several of his treatises can only be briefly encapsulated here, but have been sufficiently detailed elsewhere.56 In his earliest writings, Augustine followed earlier Latin Christian moralists -lilce Jerome and Ambrose, from whorri he borrowed some of his ideas-in questioning the place of sexuality in the will of God. "I know nothing which brings the manly mind down from the heights:' Augustine wrote in his earliest extant treatise, "more than a woman's caresses and that joining of bodies?'57 In these writings, Augustine claimed that only after the advent of sin did God permit to Adam and Eve the sexual abilities with which to procreate, so that they might replace themselves before they died (death being another consequence of the first sin). 58 In other words, sexwas not patt ofGod's original plan for humanity but began as a consequence of human sin and was linked to the punishment of human mortality. Augustine eventually changed his mind on this subject, in patt because he was uncomfortable with the idea of a God who had not anticipated human sin and had to improvise sexuality. In his later writings, Augustine argued that Adam and Eve would indeed have had sex even if they had not sinned and that sex was patt of God's plan after all, but their sexual encounters would have been orderly and completely devoid of lust. 59 Lust was the punishment for and the greatest evidence of the original sin ofAdam and Eve. 60 Indeed, lustwas the only patt of original sin that even Christian baptism could not erase, Augustine maintained, although baptism was supposed to remove all sin; lust remained lilce convalescence after illness. 61 The evidence of sin was imprinted upon us in an appropriate fashion: our inability to control our sexual thoughts or to prevent the sexual arousal of our bodies was a fitring retribution for Adam and Eve's disobedience to God. 62 Ultimately, Augustine's theological acceptance of sexuality came at the price of condemning human sexual desire as sinful. The association between sexual desire and sin was no innovation on the patt of Augustine, however, even if he laid out his understanding of the connection more carefully and more fully than most. The same linlcs can be seen in virtually every Latin Christian author. Tertullian included "the lusts of the flesh, and disbelief, and wrath" as those qualities that "are accounted to the common nature of all men, while yet the devil still has designs upon nature?' 63 Cyprian daimed that it was the Devil who "offers to the eyes seductive forms and easy pleasures so that by sight he may destroy chastit:y?'64 Lactantius also blamed the Devil for implanting sexual

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desires in men: "in our innermost parts, he sets going and incites stimuli, and he arouses and inflames that natural ardor?' 65 And Jerome declaimed: "the devil's power, all of it, is in the loins?'66 It is important to highlight here an obvious corollary to the union of sex and sin: the parallellink between sinlessness and sexlessness. That is the underlying message of the Christian writers on sexual matters. Sexual desires are the result of the wealmess of the first human beings. Human perfection, in contrast, consists in the desire for a return to the innocence of original humanity, understood both in terms of innocence from guilt and innocence of the lmowledge and practice of sex. (So innocent were Adam and Eve before they sinned, claimed Augustine, that they did not even know sexual modesty or shame and did not need to cover their genitals. 67 ) The preferred use of the Latin castitas (translated as "chastity" but which in a classical sense had meant "guiltlessness" and "innocence" and "moral purity") for Christian sexual abstinence, even more thanpudicitia) echoes with the moral superiority of sexual renunciation. Chastity subsumed all of the sexual virtues of pudicitia in late antiquity~virginity before marriage, sexual moderation and fidelity during marriage, and sexual continence in widowhood after marriage- and gave them aChristian coloring. 68 Consequently, desire for chastity was not at all the same as the fear of the physical dangers of sex, although these dangers were considered real enough. Indeed, it may not be too much to suppose that ancient medical notions of the wasring effects of sexual activity may have prompted the Christian placement of sexual desire at the heart of the debilitation caused by sin. 69 In contrast, chastity was resistance to sin, a refusal to succumb to the wealmess of temptation that had banished Adam and Eve from Paradise. The association of sexual renunciation with steadfastness and strength, in turn, helped to give it a masculine flavor and appeal. Women were already tied to physicality and wealmess through long-standing Roman cultural tradition; as objects of sexual desire they could equally stand as Christian symbols of the temptations of lust. "The enticements of sin pursue us and lust pursues us:' Ambrose wrote, "flee from it as from a frenzied mistress?' 70 Jerome recounted a disturbing but telling incident involving an unnamed martyr: When everyone had gone away, a beautiful prostitute came up to him and began to strakehisneck with gentle caresses, and (what is improper even to relate) to touchhisprivate parts with her hands: when his body was roused to lust as a result, this shameful conqueress lay down on top ofhim. The soldier of Christ did not know what to do or where to turn: he who had not

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yielded to tortures was being overcome by pleasure. At last, by divine inspiracion, he bit offhis tongue and spat it out in her face as she kissed him; and so the sense of lust was overcome by the sharp pain that replaced it. 71

The prostitute, as the sign of the temptations of sex, could not overcome the heroic resolve of the chaste "soldier of Christ." Resistance to lust, as the didactic nature of Jerome's legend indicates, was the martial sort of discipline that all men might desire for themselves. "The most selfcontrolled sort of man, when he is completely a mati [plane vir] ;' Augustine offered, is able "so manfully [viriliter] to malce use of women, that he is not subdued by the delights of the flesh, but governs them." 72 The military metaphor reinforced the links between sexual continence and manliness. Jerome used it repeatedly. "The voice of the Lord is as one exhorting and urging his soldiers to the reward of sexual modesty fpudicitia];' he wrote, and "whoever can fight, fight, conquer and triumph.w3 Augustine also relied on military imagery in a long letter to a man named Laetus, who had been considering marriage. Augustine argued that Laetus should remain celibate and thus ready for spiritual battle and not abandon his fight before the final victory by surrendering to his lust. 74 Tertullian called the desire for sex an "infirmity of the flesh" that did not compare weil to wounds received in battle or through torture (linking chastity not only with soldiering but also with martyrdom): Certainly, infirmity which succumbs in battle is more easily excused than that which succumbs in the bedchamber; that which gives way on the rack than that which gives way on the bridal bed; which yields to cruelty rather than concupiscence; which is conquered, groaning with pain, than that which is conquered, burning with lust. 75

Tertullian mocked the manliness of those who were thus conquered by sexual appetites. "A thing which calls for real virility!" he scoffed. "To rise from the easy relaxation of continence and fu1fill the functions of sexthis is to prove oneself a man indeed!"76 These descriptions were all attempts to instill the manliness of sexual renunciation in men's minds. The manly image of a charioteer in particular found its way into Christian writings on chastity. Novatian, an early-third-century presbyter at Rome, wrote a treatise entitledDe bono pudicitiae (On the Good ofSexual Modesty), in which he declared that "the spirit, after a manner of speaking, like a tried and true charioteer, curbs with the reins of the heavenly precepts the impetus of the flesh which exceeds the just limitations of the body.''77 The same image can be seen in Jerome ("you, Christ's charioteer"78) and Prudentius ("so let the desires of our bodies be reined inm9 ).

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The allusion is to Plato's Phaedrus, and it is found in a discussion of pederasty, curiously enough, although its argumentisthat men's love for boys should be spiritual and not physical. Given the Christian ambivalence about the classical philosophical tradition and the opposition to the ancient sexual values, it is odd to see it borrowed by Christian writers. But the Platonic metaphor for the soul's mastery of the body was too helpful for Christian intellectuals to ignore. It made the point that Christian moralists wanted to make andin a language familiar to the audience they wanted to reach, men educated in classicalliterature. The specific context of the metaphor in pederasty had to be ignored, but the manliness of the charioteer image outweighed the risks of reference to immoral sexual customs. Moreover, the original context of the metaphor in a discussion of classical sexual restraint probably also explains why the image of the charioteer was linked even in Christian usage to sexual renunciation. The importance of enlistirrg a manly language in support of chastity also helps to explain the numerous comparisons between Christian chastity and the athletes of the Roman arenas. (In late antiquity, charioteers were competitors in the arena rather than soldiers, so a connection could be easily made in the mind between them and other athletes ). Christian leaders overwhelming disapproved of the arena sports, in part because the arenas had been the location of the deaths of many martyrs, and when Constantirre became emperor, he outlawed gladiatorial contests. 80 But the arena sports contirrued, sports like wrestling and boxing and the killing of animals, and the manliness of the athlete was irresistible to Christian writers. It prompted Augustirre to compare the struggle for chastity to an athletic contest: Behold where the stadium is; behold where the wrestling grounds are; behold where the racecourse is; behold where the boxing ring is! ... Ifyou wish so to fight that you do not beat the air in vain but so as to strik:e your opponent manfully, then chastise your body and bring it into subjection that, abstaining from all things and contending lawfully, you may in triumph share the heavenly prize and the incorruptible crown. 81

The ambivalence of this imagery can be easily seen when this passage is compared with another: Augustirre's description of a friend named Alypius who was attracted to the arena games. With a dramatic flourish that might weil betray a certain fascination with the games himself, Augustirre depicted the scene: Alypius shut his eyes tightly, determined to have nothing to do with these atrocities. If only he had dosed his ears as weil! For an incident in the fight

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drew a great roar from the crowd, and this thrilled him so deeply that he could not contain his curiosity. ... He was confident that, if he saw it, he would find it repulsive and remain master of himself. So he opened his eyes, and his soul was stabbed with a wound more deadly than any which the gladiator, whom he was anxious to see, had received in his body.... When he saw the blood, it was as though he had drunk a deep draught of savage passion. . . . He watched and cheered and grew hot with excite. ment. 82

If the spectators ofsports rnight be seen as lacking in self-control, though, the athletes themselves were admired for their discipline and courage. "We are athletes:' Ambrose said ofhis fellowChristians in a discussion of sexual continence, "we strive, as it were, in a spiritual stadium."83 In perhaps the oddest discussion ofChristians and the arena sports, Jerome described the sainted Hilarion of Gaza: unaffected by the games as a young man but as tempted by visions of gladiatorial shows in the desert, willing to eure a charioteer but only if the man gave up his profession, and blessing the horses of a local charioteer with holy water. 84 If Christian men could be construed as athletes, then the martyrs rnight be considered as the champions among Christian athletes and rnight even function as popular celebrities in the same way that the most accomplished athletes did. (Tertullian complained that athletes were "most beloved of persans [amantissimi] to whom men surrender their souls and women even their bodies."85 ) Or at least, some Christian writers hoped to promote them as such. Cyprian compared the willingness of both gladiators and martyrs to face death. 86 Prudentius described in vivid athletic terms the martyrdom of Vincent in the arena: "now they have reached the wrestling-ground where the prize is glory, where hope contends with cruelty, and martyr and torturer face each other and join in the critical struggle?'87 Again, it may seem unusual to glorify the type of sport by which Vmcent met his death, but Christian writers were working hard to link sexual renunciation and manliness, and the obvious physicality of the men of the arenas provided the necessary connection. There may be an additional connection. It was also believed that athletes should refrain from sexual activity before their matches to preserve their vitality, and so the penises of some were even fitted with clamping devices called.fibulae that prevented erection and thus ejaculation. Such procedures were known in late antiquity and described by Oribasius, court physician to Julian, and complemented ancient medical notions of the deleterious effects of sexual expenditure. One rnight argue therefore that athletes also had connections in the mind with sexual deprivation as well as manliness. 88

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If Christian men were resisting the rigors of the sexual code preached by their spiritualleaders, asserting the manliness of sexual self-restraint was the best means of accomplishing the task of persuasion. Christian writers might understand the reasons for the sexual desire within a Biblical context, as the consequence of an original mythical sin. But they also situated the renunciation of sex solidly within a mental environrnent comprehensible and even enviable ifnot familiar to Roman men: a world of soldiers, charioteers, and athletes. This environment betrays how deeply embedded the Christian writers themselves were in the traditions of their Roman cultural heritage. As much as they might attempt to escape that heritage and to discount its influence, it remained witll. them. Christian writers oflate antiquity advocated for chastity from within this perspective. Because it was a sign of perfection, it was also an indication of manliness. The pursuit of sexual renunciation was heroic and virile; it was a mastery of the spirit and a victory of the body as weil as a repudiation of sin. Such a view of sex would also require a radical reinterpretation of the place of marriage and family life in human society. " MARRIAGE AND HERESY

Christian intellectuals argued that all sexual activity- or at least all sexual activity possible since the originalsin-was the result of the fallen nature ofhumanity. lt stands to reason that theywould discourage marriage. Mter all, it was an institution that permitred sex and even required it for the purposes of familial continuity and inheritance. Latin Christian writers made use ofboth Christian precedents and classical prejudices in elevating celibacy above marriage, again demonstrating their debt to both. But they also refused to condemn marriage altogether, regarding those as heretics who argued either for the equal moral status of marriage and celibacy or foratotal ban on marriage. The orthodox leaders of the Western Christian churches managed to claim that their ideology of marriage not only preserved the best of the classical heritage but also the most authentic of Christian beliefs. Jerome provides a convenient starring point for this discussion. His views on marriage are especially evident in his treatise entitledAdversus ]ovinianum (Against Jovinian), a vitriolic reply to a man who was preaching in Rome that celibacy had no advantage for Christians over the married state. 89 Jerome's treatise included many elements drawn from longstanding Roman ambivalence about marriage. Roman men had always halfheartedly resisted marriage, given its association for them with the transition to adult manhood and an end to the pleasures and irresponsi-

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bility of adolescence, and because their marriages were arranged by their parents and more often for political reasons than because of compatibility. Resistance to marriage had also found a place in classical philosophical writings, because it was considered as distracting a man from a vita philosophica and the pursuit of wisdom and wasring his intelligence in the mundane affairs of domestic life. 90 So it was not difficult for Jerome to enlist numerous examples from the classical heritage to aid in his discouragement of marriage. He summarized episodes of pagan history and literaturein which married couples had fallen into serious disagreements or had caused each other terrible grief (without apparent pangs of conscience here about malcing use ofpagan literature). He referred to marriage as a debt (debitum) and as chains (vinculi) because of the constraint,s it placed on a man; it was therefore not unlike slavery (a comparison we also saw in chapter 5). 91 Marriage was also ineffective, because itwas supposed to extinguish "the burning sensation oflust" (ardor libidinis) in a man but in fact only intensified it. Indeed, it turned men into irrational beasts and slaves to licentiousness (an argument that Jerome drew from classical Stoicism). 92 Jerome even attempted to demonstrate that traditional Greek, Roman, and barbarian religions already recognized the superiority of celibacy to married life (although he was forced to go far afield to find ancient examples of the praise of male sexual continence, having to use Buddha as one example of marital renunciation). 93 In all of these arguments, it is possible to see Jerome's attempt to assimilate his argument about marriage to the intellectual traditions of antiquity so that he could showhirnself to be heir to those traditions. IfJerome denounced marriage with classical arguments, his praise of celibacy drew much more from Christian sources for its inspiration. He repeated Paul's comments on the practical advantages of celibacy (Paul hirnself had likely drawn from the classical tradition of the vita philosophica in his discouragement of marriage ). 94 But much closer to the heart of Jerome's argumentwas his use of the tradition that Jesus claimed that "at the resurrection men and warnen do not marry'' but "are like the angels in heaven." 95 Celibacy was a vita angelica, an angelic lifestyle. This concept linked the renunciation of marriage with personal salvation and the life after death, but it also associated it with a return to Paradise, a recapturing of the innocence lost by Adam and Eve, and the promise of a life without sin, suffering, or death. 96 No wonder it was such a powerful concept. If that were not enough, Jerome added that for a man to remain a virgin was to follow the example of Jesus and his earliest followers, including John the Baptist and the apostle John (here the Biblical trail was not so clearly marked, but Jerome deduced that these men must have been vir-

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gins, since they were both virtuous and unmarried). 97 Christ was "a virgin from a virgin, someone uncorrupted from someone uncorrupted;' and Jerome reasoned, "therefore is virginity of divinity and blessedness."98 To be celibate was to share not only in the angelic but also in the divine. In forcefullanguage, Jerome claimed that the difference between marriage and virginity was the same as that between not sinning and actually doing good orthat between doing good and doing better. 99 When compared to marriage, celibacy was lik.e gold to silver, the fruit of the tree to its root or leaf, or the grain of the field to the stalk or stubble of the plant. 100 In sum, Jerome tried to show that marriage was inferior according to both traditional Roman and Christian standards, and that because it was inferior, it was unworthy of men aspiring to excellence. Jerome's views of Christian marriage created something of a stir at Rome in the late fourth century. Apparently not all Christians shared his opinions on marriage, and some members of the Roman aristocracy, including Jovinian's followers, resisted Jerome's conclusions. 101 It is a useful reminder to us about the limits of our knowledge about how deeply others shared the opinions of Christian leaders. Unfortunately, we do not know much about the followers ofJovinian or their numbers. They seem to have continued as an intelleemal faction until the turn of the :fifth century, when they disappeared. 102 But the bishops of the Western churches overwhelmingly supported Jerome, and Jovinian's ideas were eventually declared heretical. We can conclude from this fact that even if some Romans shared the beliefs of Jovinian that marriage was equal in honor to celibacy, their numbers were insufficient to hold the day. (Ultimately, the decision favorable to Jerome and the support for his ideas probably also helped in promoting the belief that the Latin clergy should be celibate, since greater perfection was expected of them than most men. In contrast, while Greek: theologians also wrote about the inferiority of marriage to celibacy-and from whom Jerome seems to have borrowed some ofhis arguments about sex and marriage-there was not a similar focus on the issue in the late fourth century, and the clergy continued to marry103 ). Here as elsewhere in Christian ideology, heretical meant a minority opinion. I would suggest that the association of sexlessness with sinlessness explains why the intelleemal faction promoting the equality of marriage and celibacy never reached the level of popularity and numerical support for its ideas to triumph. The heretical nature of theologians lilce Jovinian was little more than their inability to provide a suitable and acceptable meaning for Roman men's reluctance to marry. It was not Biblical precedent that Jovinian and his allies lacked. They also had an armory of Biblical and cultural citations from which they argued (insofar as we

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can reconstruct their arguments from the writings of their opponents): the holiest of the Old Testament patriarchs were married as was the apostle Peter, Jesus registered his support for the married life by performing his first miracle at the wedding of Cana, and some of the holiest of martyrs were married. Jerome's approach was more successful not because it was berter grounded in the Christian scriptures-in fact, in one letter he explained how he felt that one could ignore God's Biblical exhortation to ·"be fruitful and multiply;' and turn Paul's exhortation to remain unmarried into a virtual command- but because his ideas resonated more loudly arnong the elite of late ancient Rome. 104 Roman men who were Christians were looking to their theologians to provide them with pious reasons to avoid the marriages their parents were contracting for them. Jerome affered them an opportunity to see marital renunciation not only as reasonable but also as holy, and not only as holy but as manly, and Jovinian did not. What is more, Jerome and his supporters allowed men to see marital renunciation as one more battle in the ongoing war between manliness and unmanliness. Marriage and sexual relations, Jerome argued, "effeminate a manly spirit [animumque virilem effeminat]?nos Celibacy, in contrast, was the manly life. ''No soldier marches into battle with a wife;' Jerome said sirnply (and probably alluding to the classical prohibition against the marriage ofRoman soldiers, a prohibition ended in the third century). 106 Jerome depicted Jovinian as a voluptuary and a hypocrite, since Jovinian seems not to have been married himself. Even if these charges were untrue, theywere an efficient means ofdiscrediting him, because they called into question his manliness. 107 Siricius ofRome also referred to Jovinian as "an opponent of sexual modesty [pudicitia] and a master of indulgence [luxuria ].''108 Ambrose, in condemning followers of Jovinian, called them "delicate men" (delicati) and Epicureans, saying that they tempted others to reject the rigors of celibacy because they themselves were unable to sustain them. 109 The skill of these men at wielding the catchwords of manliness and unmanliness was surely part of the eventual success of their ideological position. At the turn of the fifth century, Augustine ofHippo entered the debate with Jovinian's remaining followers about the relative merits of marriage and celibacy. His treatise on the subject, De bono conjugali (On the Good ofMarriage) defended the permissibility of marriage but also maintained its inferiorityto sexual abstinence. Like Jerome, he used metaphors to describe the relationship ofthe two: it was lilce the respective brilliance of the sun and the moon, or the differing brightness of two stars. 110 Augustine tried to stay clear of some of Jerome's more extravagant language

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against marriage and so avoid the reaction to Jerome's work, but his work reveals the same ideological stance. As a result, Augustine argued that "marriage and continence are two good things, the second of which is better.''m Augustine also contrasted the command of God in the period before Christ, when the patriarchs married several wives without sinning, with that ofhis own days, when a man "does better who does not marry even one wife, unless he cannot control himself." 112 Moreover, "in our day, it is true, no man perfect in piety seeks to have children except spiritually.''113 In a companion treatise written at the same time, De sancta virginitate (On Holy Virginity), Augustine clarified his view that virginity was the true Christian sexual ideal. Indeed, to support his position he claimed that virgins were rewarded in Heaven in unique and preferable ways for their sexual renunciation on Earth. 114 There existed a hierarchy ofheavenly rewards, he alleged, in which virgins received a greater share than did married persons in the same way in which martyrs received a greater reward than did nonmartyrs. 115 The assimilation of virgins with martyrs was telling: it emphasized the perfection ofboth types ofChristians, the sacrifice endured by both, and the manliness of both. Through a rejection of the feminizing effects of marriage, that is, the interior wealcness and bodily indulgence that it was believed to mal;;:e manifest, a Christian man could prove his manliness. In addition, the host of problems that ancient marriages entailed- the difficult choice of finding a compatible bride and a suitable familial alliance, the exchange of economic resources in marriage payments and gifts, and the fears that once entangled in the bonds of marriage, it was increasingly difficult to disentangle oneself because of restrictions on divorce-all could be surmounted by abandoning the whole affair and remaining celibate. Again, it is helpful to remernher that marriage among the upper dass es in late antiquity was not begun out of romantic or sexual desire but arranged by families for financial or political reasons. The appeal of the renunciation of marriage was present in Christian writers long before the end of the fourth century. We can see the same ambivalence already in the writings of Tertullian from the early third century. "I assign to continence and virginity preference over marriage:' Tertullian wrote early in his writing career, "yet without prohibiting marriage.'' 116 Nonetheless, Tertullian was married himself, and in a treatise dedicated to his wife he even depicted a pleasant mutuality of a Christian husband and wife before God: How shall we ever be able adequately to describe the happiness ofthat marriage which the Church arranges, the Eucharist strengthens, upon which

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the blessing sets a seal, at which angels are present as witnesses, and to which the Father gives His consent? For not even on earth do children marry properly and legally without their fathers' permission. How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in hope, one in desire, one in the way oflife they follow, one in the religion they practice. They are as brother and sister, both servants of the same Master. 117

Toward the end of his life, however, Tertullian adopted a much barsher view of marriage and sexual relations, in part because of his association with the Montanists, a Christian group from Asia Minor later declared heretical. In his De exhortatione castitatis (On the Exhortation to Chastity), for example, Tertullian listed all of the practical justifications that a man might give for getting married. He would need someone to administer his domestic affairs; he would like someone with whom he might share his daily worries; he would hope for a son to inherit his name and estate; he would want to contribute to the collective body of citizens. Tertullian dismissed allsuch claims as "excuses bywhich we color our insatiable carnal appetite." 118 Tertullian also insisted that marriage was a sexual vice not much different from any other, because it sprang from "the carnal nature of lust, which is the cause of all stuprum. Is it not obvious therefore that stuprum is approximate to marriage, since what is found in it belongs also to stuprum?"119 Most of the Latin Christian writers after Tertullian did not go so far as he did in his disdain for marriage, yet all of the orthodox writers felt the same ambivalence about marriage and marital sexual relations. Still, as much as later writers like Jerome and Augustirre wished to assert the inferiority of marriage and sex to celibacy and virginity, they refused to condemn marriage altogether. They all tried to walle the middle ground between approval and disapproval. Their reasons for accepting the value of marriage at allarenot self-evident and deserve some explanation. Augustine's assertion that marriage was inferior to celibacy but still morally permissible, for example, obliged him to abandon his usual philosophical position that sin was nothing more than an inferior moral choice and that there were no "lesser good things." Christians of an earlier generation might have been accused of trying to accommodate the Roman civillaws in permitring marriage, since unmarried and childless persans were penalized in their right to accept and pass on property and inheritances. (Tertullian, for example, specifically contrasted the laws ofRome with the law ofChrist, saying that the latter promised an equal inheritance to celibate and childless persans as to married persans with children. 120) But Christians of Jerome and Augustine's day had no such practicallimita-

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tions, after Constantine ended the penalties against the unm~ried and childless. The explanation lies elsewhere, and will be developed more fully below andin chapter 7. For the moment it is enough to say that orthodox Christian writers were attempting to distance themselves from various Bastern Christian sects that prohibited all marital and sexual behaviors- groups lilce the Montanists, who were still not as radical as others in their rejection of sex and marriage. These Bastern groups shared much with the Western Christian writers, including a belief in the heroic nature of sexual renunciation and exhortations to follow the divine example of Christ and the angelic lifestyle of virginity, but they di.tfered in forbidding all marriages and condemning all sexual activity as sinful. 121 At least one of these Bastern Christian sects, the Manichaeans (so called because a man named Mani had founded them), had a considerable following in the western Mediterranean at the end of the fourth century. The extent and popularity of Manichaean Christianity in the West is not entirely clear to modern scholars. It certainly had impressive numbers of adherents in North Mrica. Augustine, for instance, was a participant in the religion for almost a decade and took the Manichaean threat seriously enough after his conversion to devote several treatises to the refutation of its doctrine and to engage in several public debates against leaders of the Manichaeans. 122 Julian, a bishop of Bclanum in southern Italy, seems to have argued in a lost treatise that Augustine's continued beliefin the sinfulness of sexual desire showed that he had not sufficiendy repudiated his earlier Manichaean ideas. 123 Circles of Manichaean or at least Manichaean-type Christians were also scattered through Italy, Spain, and Gaul; it was the fears of their presence there that led to the first execution of a Christian for heresy, that of Priscillian, bishop of Avila, in 385. 124 Ambrose, who objected to the execution of Priscillian, also spoke ·out against the Manichaeans and others who condemned marriage altogether.125 The appeal of Manichaean Christianity in the West must not be underestimated. The Manichaeans also borrowed elements of the classical heritage, adopting the same Platonic ideas of the superiority of the mind over the body that orthodox writers were incorporating into their religious philosophy. Nor must the possibility be excluded that Manichaean beliefs encouraged the sametype of manliness that orthodox Christians advocated. The Manichaean myth of the struggle between the powers ofLight and the powers ofDarkness, for example, probably encouraged the type of military identity to which the soldier of Christ was a parallel; the place of sexuality within this struggle as the evidence of evil also paralleled the orthodox ideal of sexual renunciation. 126 Manichaean leaders also applied to themselves the label of true brides of Christ. 127 In-

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deed, the teachings of the Manichaeans threatened orthodoxy in !arge part because of these many similarities. Christian writers, in condemning the Manichaeans and the other groups that rejected sex and marriage, once again made use of the cultural language of manliness and unmanliness. Tertullian (earlier in his career, when he was still defending marriage) set the tone by describing his opposition to the Bastern Christian sects as an athletic or gladiatorial contest: In a combat of boxers and gladiators, generally speaking, it is not because a man is strong that he gains the victory, or loses it because he is not strong, but because he who is vanquished was a man of no strength; and indeed this very conqueror, when afterwards matched against a really powerful man, actually retires crest-fallen from the contest. In precisely the same way, heresies derive such strength as they have from the infirmities of individuals-having no strength whenever they encounter a really powerful faith.l28

When Tertullian denounced Marcion, the leader of an Bastern group that required complete sexual renunciation, he also described their contest as a battle pitting the strong against the weak. 129 Orthodox Christian writers after Tertullian made use of this same manly military language, but they also often accused their intellectual opponents of sexual immorality. Indeed, they used exacdy the same sorts of descriptions of sexuallicense in their condernnation of the Manichaeans and the other groups that renounced sex and marriage as they had used in condemning individuals like Jovinian who advocated the equality of marriage and celibacy. Jerome, who believed Priscillian of Avila to be a Manichaean, accused him of presiding over secretive religious rituals involving sex with his female followers, warnen ofill repute. 130 Philaster, a fourth-century bishop ofBrescia in north Italy, depicted the Manichaeans vaguely as "slaves to nefarious turpitude?' 131 Leo the Great, bishop of Romein the mid-fifth century, accused them of"multiple perversities;' "the mixing of all kinds of sordid things;' "a multitude of crimes;' "sacred rites as obscene as they are nefarious;' and "an execrable thing which our ears can scarcely bear to hear;' the last of which he clarified as the sexual use of a ten-year-old girl. "In this sect;' Leo concluded, "no sexual modesty [pudicitia] is tobe found, no righteousness, no chastity. " 132 Leo's accusations, repeated before the Roman Senate and combined with the forced confessions of a Manichaean leader, prompted the imperial government of Valentinian 111 to issue a ban against the religion. The law used the same sott of language of unmanliness and alleged that the

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Manichaeans exercised an "unchaste perversity, [which] in the name of religion, commits crimes that are unknown and shameful even to brothels?'1331t was only the last of a long series of secular laws against the Manichaeans, the earliest ofwhich was enacted in 372. 134 Beginning in 381, Christian emperors enacted similar restrictions against other Bastern Christian groups that condemned marriage. 135 Men who belonged to heretical sects generally were deprived of the legal rights belonging to other men. 136 The charge of secret sexual immorality against these groups opposed to marriage is a curious one. Mter all, these groups were advocating the total renunciation of sex. Some of the details of the accusations may have been true, like those made by Augustine, who said that the Manichaeans permitred sexual alternatives to procreative intercourse as lesser evils, because they did not entrap morepure souls into wicked bodies. 137 1t is also possible that if these groups believed that sex was sinful, they may not have believed that any one form of sexwas less sinful than another. Other opponents of these heretical sects made ad hominem attacks, accusing their leaders of not practicing what they preached. 138 Augustirre claimed hirnself to have witnessed groups of carousing Manichaeans who were supposed to have renounced sex pursuing women for immoral purposes in the streets of Carthage. 139 But the point of all of these accusations was clear enough. The manly renunciation of sexwas impossible for heretics, because the falsehood of their doctrines meant that they did not have the integrity to achieve real chastity. Their sexual deviance was part and parcel of their doctrinal deviance. Chastity was not laudable if it was heretical because it was heretical, Tertullian said simply. 140 "Such virgins as there are said tobe among the different kinds ofheretics, or with the followers of the :filthy Mani:' Jerome declared, "must be considered not virgins but prostitutes?' 141 Such accusations, whether true or not-and it is impossible to decide whether they are true or not- had an important rhetorical function. If the Manichaeans and other groups opposing marriage could be presented as clandestinely indulgent in sexual matters rather than as representative of the sexless ideal, then orthodox Christians could continue to see themselves, despite permitring the indulgence of marriage, as the truly continent, as the closest to Christian perfection, and also as the manliest. Charges of sexual vice could serve important religious ends, separating both the manly from the unmanly and the orthodox from the heretical.

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MARRIAGE AND MALE AUTHORITY

The accusations of effeminacy against those who condemned marriage describes the orthodox Christian position but does not explain it. The appeal of the orthodox position, simply enough, lay in its ability to justify the continued Subordination of women to men. Augustine's delineation of the benefits of marriage provides an excellent example of the utility of Christian marriage, even devalued as it was, as a basis for continued masculine authority in private life. It is still necessary to explain why the orthodox position, which permitted marriage as a concession to human wealcness, should have prevailed over the heretical position, which forbade such wealcness altogether. It seems at face value as though the Manichaeans and those lilce them had the better intellectual position, at least in the context of the general Christian devaluation of marriage, but their eventuallass to the orthodox position must mean that they were unable to gain the numbers sufficient to unseat it. It has been argued that the Christian groups that triumphed were those that allowed for a distinction between strict and moderate lifestyles and that the Christian groups eventually defined as heresies were those that insisted that all adherents practice too severe an ascetic life. This argument maintains that the sects that permitted a wider range ofbehaviors could become more easily assimilated to the !arger society than those that were too demanding. 142 Doubtless the point is well made, and several orthodox writers made a contrast between the narrow and difficult path to salvation of asceticism and the broad and easy path of marriage and family life but stressed that both reached the same destination.143 But Manichaean Christianity also had such a division between moderates, called auditores (the hearers), and rigorists, called electi (the chosen). Bven the early life of Augustine attested to this division (while a Manichaean, Augustine had cohabited with a woman who had borne him a son). I would argue instead that the eventual success of Catholic Christianity in the West has more to do with the ramifications of the total renunciation of marriage and family life for Roman men's identity and authority. The Bastern sects that forbid sex and marriage also tended to advocate a greater sexual equality. The Montanists that Tertullian joined, for example, allowed both men and women to prophesy; more will be said about some Bastern Christian groups' elimination of sexual difference in chapter 7. U pholding the moral permissibility of marriage, even while relegating it to an inferior status, aided in the important task of continuing men's domination and women's subordination. Catholic Christian leaders who permitted marriage did so because the existence of mar-

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ital and familial roles helped to perpetuate masculine privileges, privileges too imbedded in the Roman cultural heritage for a religious philosophy arguing for their eradication to win out among Roman men. There were Scripruralmotives for the orthodox desire to permit marriage, it is true. Even while Jesus was remernbered as spealcing in favor of the abandonment of marital and familial expectations, for example, he also was supposed to have spoken about the indissolubility of marriage on Earth and the error of divorce. 144 Of course, the orthodox bishops also influenced which gospels were accepted as the authentic teachings ofJesus; other gospels like the Gospel ofThomas in which Jesus condemned marriage altogether, were rejected by them as inauthentic. 145 Bastern groups supporting the total condemnation of marriage understandably believed in the authenticity of these gospels. The letters of Paul and Peter in the N ew Testament encouraged Christians not to marry, but they also established the so-called "household codes" in which wives were exhorted to obey their husbands, slaves their masters, and children their parents, in a general continuation of the social hierarchy. (Modern religious scholars mostly reject the authenticity of the texts with these "household codes;' but ancient authorities accepted their authenticity).146 In an important passage in one of these doubtful texts, the relationship between husband and wife was compared tothat between Christ and the Church (an image borrowed from the Song ofSongs) as two separate persans joined into one body by means of a mystical marriage. The Pauline writer called it mysterion (a mystery) but Latin writers translated the term as sacramentum (a sacred [military] vow) rather than the more usual mysterium probably because of the connection of the term sacramentum with the pagan mystery religions that affered an intimate bond between bellever and deity not unlike the one promised by the rriarital metaphor. 147 Other Pauline writings, like the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which advocated the total renunciation of marriage and gender differences, were lilcewise proclaimed inauthentic by orthodox leaders, and authentic by hereticalleaders. 148 Ultimately, Biblical texts were mostly approved or rejected and Biblical passages cited or ignored insofar as they corresponded with already existing beliefs about the place of sex and marriage within the Christian life. Augustine, who is again the most systematic of the Latin Christian theologians, provides a helpful focal point for our discussion. Augustine's treatise, De nuptiis et concupiscentia (On Marriage and Sexual Desire ), was intended to clarify his position regarding the relationship between marriage, sexuality, and sin, in response to the accusation that he still held Manichaean beliefs. lt is a crucial work on the Christian ideal-

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ogy of marriage. According to Augustine, the positive value of marriage could be found in its three benefits (bona1 "good things;' that he also called itsfructus1 "fruits"), but which he also called its three chains (vinculi), following Jerome. First was the begetting of children, which he called proles (offspring). Second was the exclusive sexual nature of the relationship between busband and wife, which he calledfides (fidelity). Third was the idea that the relationship symbolized the love between Christ and the Christian Church, which he called sacramentum from the Biblical metaphor. 149 If we examine each of the three benefits in the writings of the other orthodox leaders, we will see that they provide important clues to the value of marriage, because each provides a plank. in a platform of continuing masculine authority within marriage. First,proles: The orthodox Christian writers agreed that the only appropriate use of sex, even within marriage, was for the purpose of procreation. Lactantius called marriage a "divine and admirable work of God, foreseen and planned by His unfathomable design for the propagation of the race;' but complained that the "obscene lustfulness" of some men meant that "they no Ionger seek anything from this most holy institution ofsex other than empty and sterile pleasure?' 150 What he seems to have meant by this "sterile pleasure" was oral sex between married couples, since he also complained about the men "who defile the most sacred part of their bodies" 151 and against "those whose most loathsome passion and execrable madness spares not even the head." 152 Cyprian complained about the same thing: If you should be able ... to direct your eyes into secret places, to unfasten the locked doors of sleeping chambers and to open these hidden recesses to the perception of sight, you would behold that being carried on by the unchaste which a chaste countenance could not behold; you would see what it is a crime even to see; you would see what those demented with the fury of vices deny that they have done and hasten to do.... The same persons are accusers in public and the defendants in secret, both their own critics and the guilty. They condemn abroad what they commit at home. 153

Still, he concluded, "whatever sin is committed with the voice is less than that by the mouth?n 54 Cyprian felt certain that the nonprocreative sexual practices he denounced were commonplace, but we cannot know how accurate he was in his estimation. The issue was important enough for Cyprian that he left hirnself open to the same charge, because ifthose who rail in public against various sexual sins can be accused of committing them in secret, Cyprian has implicated hirnself in what he has denounced. Like the classical Roman moralists before them, Cyprian and Lactantius

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worried in particular about the moral implications of oral sex. Like the medical writers of late antiquity, they also felt that procreation was the only appropriate purpose of sex. Nonetheless, the Catholic writers did not only discourage "sterile" sexual acts within marriage but also procreative ones. As Augustine explained it, allsexual desire necessarily embodied the tragedy ofthe human predicament: ever since human beings had rebelled against God, our flesh had ever after rebelled against our minds. Our inability to control our bodies and their desires, and the influence that our bodies' demands perversely exert over us, mirrar the brokenness ofthe human relationship with God. Marriage was an attempt to bring some order back to this rebellion of the body and to reestablish the domination of the will but was beneficial only as lang as it kept to this purpose and restrained sexual desire. 155 Augustine spoke out, therefore, even agairrst married couples who "make intemperate use of their [conjugal] right;' wondering "whether this situation should be called a marriage?' 156 The best marriages were the ones that involved little or no sex, Augustine concluded, because they were the most orderly in a physical sense and the most caring in a rational sense. 157 Augustine called these sexless marriages "an example of perfection [exempla peifectionis]?'158 (We can assume that these were the sorts of statements that led to accusations ofManichaeanism against Augustine.) The encouragement of sexless marriages formed part of the fallout from the fourth-century debate over the place of sex and marriage in the Christian life. In some ways, it was an intellectual concession to the Christians who argued that sex and marriage were always sinful. Married couples were exhorted to renounce sex, and Christian writers often counseled married women (who seem mostly to have initiated such marriages) on how they might best persuade a reluctant husband to forego sexual relations even within marriage. Amodern study of these socalled spiritual marriages suggests that they originated in women's attempts at autonomy within marriage. 159 The usefulness of the institution of spiritual marriage, however, was that it supported sexual renunciation while leaving men's domination over women intact. Indeed, the reaffirmation of a husband's authority over his wife was always at the forefront of the Christian writings on spiritual marriage. Pelagius, a fifth-century teacher in Rome, wrote to a married woman named Celantia who wished to end sexual relations with her husband, that "first of all, your husband should be given all authority, and the entire hausehold should learn from you how much honor is owed to him. Show by your obedience that he is lord, and by your humility that he is great?' 160 Pelagius chided her for attempting to force a spiritual marriage upon her husband by withholding

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sex, because "it is a dangeraus matter to promise what is in another's power?' He added: The practice of chastity, I am sorry to say, has simply led to adultery. For while one party abstains even from what is licit, the other party falls into what is illicit. In such a case I do not know who deserves the greater censure, who deserves the greater blame: the one who committed fornication after his wife rejected him, or the wife who by rejecting her husband presented him, in a certain way, with the opportunity for fornication. 161

It is obvious that Pelagius was not really concerned with Celantia's reasons for wanting to forgo sex or with its benefits for her spiritual wellbeing or development; Pelagius's concern was, rather, with her husband and his authority over her. Augustine, despite his opposition to Pelagius on other matters (the two quarreled over the nature and effect of original sin), agreed with him on this point. "[Your husband] should not have been defrauded of the debt you owed him of your body;' Augustine wrote to a woman named Ecdicia, "before his will joined yours in seeking the good which surpasses the sexual modesty [pudicitia] ofmarriage;' managing in the same sentence both to praise sexless marriage and to condemn Ecdicia's choice of it. 162 We also see in this concern for men's spiritual health another reason for the sensitivity of Christian writers to married men's adultery and to men's sexual use of slaves and prostitutes, as described at the start of this chapter. Men were liable to turn to these traditional sexual outletsoutside of marriage when their wives tried unilaterally to renounce sex for spiritual purposes. Second,jides: The fidelity expected of married persans became for orthodox Christian writers another occasion for reiterating masculine authority. When Christian leaders condemned adultery, they madefrequent reference to its breach of the fides of marriage. Christian opposition to divorce also implied that marital fidelity was a lifelong proposition. 163 The defense of marital fidelity is most clearly seen in orthodox discussions of remarriage. Remarriage was closely bound up with the general indissolubility of marriage, since it was often feit to be the impetus for divorce and since it was often presented as being a form of adultery, and so it was considered a grave falling away from the ideal of marital fidelity. The reinforeerneut of traditional marital roles through the ideal of fidelity was a central element in the Christian opposition to remarriage. Already at the beginning of the third century, Tertullian wrote to persuade his wife not to remarry after his death. He tried to place doubts in her mind about its desirability, saying that if she entered a future marriage, she would be forced to submit to her new husband's authority. For

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example, she would be unable to participate in the charitable activities that would ensure her salvation: Who would allow his wife to run around the streets to the houses of strangers and even to the poorest hovels in order to visit the faithful? Who would willingly let his wife be talcen from his side for nighdy meetings, if it be necessary? Who, then, would talerate without some anxiety her spending the entire night at the paschal solemnities? Who would have no suspicions about letting her attend the Lord's Supper, when it has such a bad reputation? Who would endure her creeping into prison to kiss the chains ofthe martyrs? Oreven to greet anyofthe brothers with akiss? Or to wash the feet ofthe saints? Todesire this? Even tothink about it? 164

Note that Tertullian did not question a husband's right to forbid these things ofhis wife. After joining the Montanists, Tertullian took an even stronger stance against remarriage, and argued in two treatises dedicated to the subject (De exhortatione castitatis and De monogamia) that remarriage should be forbidden to Christians, also using a combination ofBiblical and classical precedents. 165 Later orthodox writers refused to talce such a rigid stance, but while they were willing to accept the permissibility of second or subsequent marriages, they discounted them as progressively inferior to the ideal of marital fidelity. 166 For their Strategie purposes, they revived the ancient Roman cultural tradition of a woman's lifelong reverence for one husband as a "one-man woman" (univira) and contrasted the honor ofwidowhood with the dishonor of remarriage. The legal restrictions on unmarried persans in the early empire had deprived this tradition of much real meaning, but the repeal of these restrictions in late antiquity allowed for a renewal of this moral ideal, and orthodox writers showed themselves in this regard eager upholders of tradition. The univira, it must be noted, existed as a feminine ideal only in the sense that a devoted widow testified to the unique merit ofher late husband; it was a reflected virtue. "She has not lost her man:' Ambrose wrote, "who demonstrates chastity [after his death]; nor is she widowed of her companion, who does not change the name ofher husband [by remarriage].'' 167 Ambrose even claimed that widows could surmount "the usual nature of the weakness of the[ir] sex by the devotion of the mind" to their deceased husband. 168 When discussions of remarriage were directed atmen, this reflected value of marital fidelity is ignored. Tertullian thought that a man's desire to remarry after the death of a first wife showed an effeminate lack of selfdiscipline.169 The third-century writer Minucius Felix also felt that a man who married only once demonstrated the control ofhis mind over his de-

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sires. 170 The honor due a deceased wife is notably absent. But the discussions of remarriage were usually directed at warnen, who were much likelier to outlive their husbands given the differences in ages at marriage, and presented an opportunity formen to speak directly to warnen in conservative language about men's and women's marital roles. Third, sacramentum: Exegesis on the mystical union between Christ and the Christian church became, in the hands of the orthodox writers, another opportunity for conservative comments about marital roles. For instance, they used them to reinforce ancient ideals of women's pudicitia before and during marriage. Cyprian wrote that "the spouse of Christ cannot be de:filed, she is inviolate and chaste; she knows one harne alone, in all modesty she keeps faithfully to one chamber?' 171 ''No one should doubt that the Church is a virgin:' declared Ambrose, because Christ "is able to vouch for the virginity of the Church in the purity of his people.'' 172 (In general, Biblical models could be called upon to support traditional models of marriage. 173 ) The comparison of Christ to a husband also reinforced ancient ideals of the subordination of warnen to men. A wife "is under the power of her husband:' wrote Ambrose, and "is in subjection to her husband, for that he is lord over her.''174 Pelagius suggested that a Christian woman should honor her Christian husband even more than she would a pagan one precisely because he also represented Christ to her. 175 So while depictions of the Church as the bride of Christ might malce important theological points, they also made important Statements about gender roles, and representing a Christian husband as Christ multiplied his authority over his wife beyond the capacity for description. It has been argued that some orthodox writers regarded Christian marriage not as a reinforcement of traditional roles but as an experiment in equality. It could be said, for example, that a comparison between a husband and Christ was meant to temper marital authority with affection. "Let a wife show deference, not be a slave to her husband; let her show herself ready to be ruled not coerced:' Ambrose suggested; "let a husband also guide his wife like a steersman, honor her as the partner of his life, share with her as a joint heir of grace.'' 176 It has been claimed that spiritual marriages were such an arrangement of equals, and Paulinus, bishop of N ola in south Italy at the end of the fourth century who was hirnself a partner in a sexless marriage, has been used as an example of this viewpoint. 177 Paulinus said in a marriage hymn or epithalamium he had composed for the wedding ofJulian ofEclanum (the same bishop who later opposed Augustine) that "the chaste spouse who has achieved the status of sister is no Ionger subject to her husband.'' 178 But Paulinus also

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advocated strongly for the continuation of male authority in marriage, based on the mystical marriage between Christ and the Church. In the same hymn to Julian ofEclanum, he suggested that a wife "should with a humble mind regard Christ in her spouse, so that, woven in lilce a joint, she might grow into his holy body, and so that her husband might be her head, whose head is Christ?'179 Paulinus also honored with a poem one of the most famous sexless couples ofhis day, Melania the Younger and her husband Pinian. It was Pinian, though, who was given a heroic stature as "victor ofhis own body."180 Paulinus wrote other letters to other spiritually married couples. In one, he said of a wife: She is no one's head, but the embellishment ofher husband by the adornment of her virtue. We might say that she is placed at the base to support that body's chain which is link:ed to God by the head of Christ, to Christ by the head of man, and to man by the head of woman. But Christ makes woman also belong to the head at the top by making her part of the body and of the structure of the limbs. 181

In another letter, Paulinus argued that a good wife "does notleadher husband to effeminacy and greed, but brings [him] bade to self-discipline and courage?' Like other orthodox writers, he was malcing obvious use of the traditionallanguage of masculine privilege, and the husband's spiritual benefi.twas the primaryfocus ofhis comments. lndeed, such a virtuous wife "is worthy of admiration because of her great emulation of God's marriage wirhin the Church;' Paulinus maintained, and if she participated in manly duritia) becoming lilce "the bones ofher husband;' she was still symbolically subsumed into his body. 182 (Paulinus of Nola, it should be noted, had important personal reasons for defending the sanctity of spiritual marriage, because it was a way of undermining the attaclcs against married clerics, including men such as hirnself Paulinus could, nonetheless, recount the woes of marriage with the best of them. 183 ) In sum, even Christian marriages that did not include the debilitating effects of sex demonstrated the masculine authority that was so much in question in the later empire. That opinion overrode all others. The enumeration of the purposes of marriage-proles).fides) and sacramentum-each provided different opportunities for a renewed emphasis on the authority of the husband. Others might have expressed more nuanced notions of men's marital rights, but all were in general agreement with Augustine that marriage could be described as "a lcind of friendly and genuine union of the one ruling and the other obeying?' 184 Even wirhin a general framework of the devaluation of marriage, the domination of men remained.

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FAMILIES AND FRIENDS

In discounting marriage and the sexual relations that stemmed from it, orthodox Christian writers also undermined much of the basis of family life. The repercussions were felt especially in the subversion of the affectional relations within families and between parents and children. Although familial affection was assumed, Christian leaders exhorted members of the Christian community to ignore their loyaldes to their families and to find emotional support and campanionship in friendships. Friendship provided a replacement for the intimacy of marriage and the affection of family life without the dangers of sex. Friendship also provided the key to the rescue of patemal authority even within a general intellectual environment of the renunciation of sex and marriage. Christian writers assumed familial affection. Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine all wrote of the love between parents and their children. 185 Breaches of such affection were equally counted as unnatural. Ambrose wrote about a father who sold his children into slavery to pay his debts; it was an action within the limits of traditional patria potestas) Ambrose admitted, although he condemned it as heartless. 186 Still, Christian writers made it clear that the individual owed greater love to God than to any family member. Following the Statement attributed to Jesus that "if any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters ... he cannot be my disciple;' Christian writers advocated an extreme emotional detachment from family ties. 187 Ambrose insisted that "one who has God as his portion should care for nothing except God;' even if it should require a "renunciation of family, and a kind of alienation from dear ones.''188 Augustine went so far as to suggest that in the same woman a good Christian [husband] loves the being that God has created, and ... wishes her to be transformed and renewed, while he hates the corruptible and mortal relationship and marital intercourse .... He loves her insofar as she is a human being, but . . . hates her under the aspect of wifehood. 189

Jerome argued that the Biblical command "Honor thy father" applied only "if you do not separate yourself from your true father [in Heaven].''190 The important relationship was the one of obedience to God, who was given all of the absolute power of the ancient paterfamil-

ias. Christian writers often used Biblical examples as models of detachment from family life and obedience to God. Abraham was typically presented as the ideal of the man who loved God more than his family, be-

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cause he had been willing to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command. Cyprian praised hirn for this gesture: Thus Abraham pleased God because, in order to please God, he neither feared to lose his son nor refused to commit parricide .... The fear of God and faith ought to make you ready for all things. Though it should be the lass of private property, though it should be the constant and violent afßiction of the members by wasring diseases, though it should be the mournful and sorrowful tearing away from wife, from children, from departing dear ones, letnot such things be stumbling biodes for you. 191

Other stories from the lives ofthe patriarchs functioned in much the same way. When discussing Rebecca's favoring of Jacob over Esau, Ambrose began by arguing that parents should love all children equally, but ended by adrnitting that ''with that pious mother, God's mysterious plan was more important than her offspring."192 The lives of the early Christian martyrs also presented similar models of the renunciation of family. Martyrs were always represented as dispassionately detached from their families of birth. For example, the anonymaus Latin passion oflrenaeus, bishop of Sirmium in Pannonia who was martyred in about 300, included the following scene: Irenaeus's relatives arrived and when they saw him under torture they began to entreat him. His children kissed his feet and begged, "Father, have pity on yourself and on us!" Then the married warnen [ofhis household] urged him to yield, weeping for his youth and his good looks. He was hard pressed by the weeping and mourning of all his relatives, the groans ofhis servants, the wailing ofneighbors, and the crying ofhis friends .... But, as has been said, he was gripped by a much stronger passion, keeping before his eyes the words of the Lord, who said: "Whoever shall deny me before men, I too will deny him before my Father who is in heaven?' And so, despising all of them, lrenaeus made no reply to anyone: for he was in haste to attain the hope ofhis heavenly calling. 193

The lesson was meant not only for men but also for women. In the account of the martyrdom ofPerpetua at Carthage, part of which was possibly written by Perpetua herself, her father played a key role. Nonetheless, the demands of her religion voided his authority over her: "Daughter;' he said, "have pity on my gray head-have pity on me your father, ifl deserve to be called your father, ifl have favored you above all your brothers, ifl have raised you to reach this prime of your life. Do not abandon me to the reproach of men. Think of your brothers, think of your

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mother and your aunt, think. of your child who will not be able to live after you are dead?' 194

"This was the way my father spoke out of love for me;' the autobiographical portion continued, "kissing my hands and throwing hirnself down before me and weeping?' 195 The whole point of these tender depictions was to highlight the fact that while affection existed within farnilies, true Christians must reject its demands. In this context, the contrast is sharp between Irenaeus as a Christian pateifamilias, who preferred true religion to his family and Perpetua's father as a traditional pateifamilias, whodidnot. In place of farnilial affections, Christian writers emphasized the bonds that joined all members of the Christian community. In the Latin translation of the martyrdom of Phileas ofThmuis in Egypt, also from about 300, for example, the anonymaus author described how all those around Phileas "begged him to have regard for his wife and concern for his children;' but that "it was like water wearing away a rock;' since Phileas "rejected what they said, claiming that the aposdes and the martyrs were his kin?' 196 An elaborate symbolic genealogy gradually took shape, derived from Biblical passages interwoven with contemporary experience offamily life, in which God played the father and pateifamilias, exercising his authority over Christ his son and the Christian Church as the bride of Christ, she who was, in turn, mother to an extended hausehold of angels, saints, martyrs, and living Christians. But as brides of Christ, Christian bishops might also assume the role of mother to their local communities. ''Do not reject the instruction ofyour mother;' Paulinus ofNola recommended to Licentius, referring to Augustine ofHippo; "he is anxious to give you suck and nourishment from the breasts of the spirit as well, if only you will allow his teaching to guide you as a mother's hand?' 197 ''As soon as the Son of God set foot on earth;' Jerome said plainly, "He formed for Hirnself a new household. 198 Similarly, the discouragement of affection between family members was replaced by a greater devotion to the bonds of friendship. Foremost among these friendships were the ties between two men. Male friendships had always held an esteemed place in Roman culture; misogyny and the low status of women had also encouraged men to depend upon each other for campanionship and intelleemal development instead of upon women. 199 Christian texts of late antiquity often described male pairs in intimate partnerships. The benefits provided by one friend to another contributed to the moral and spiritual edification of both, as well as to their mutual support. Augustine used male friendship to discuss why

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God had created Eve for Adam; the purpose must have been sexual, he argued, because a woman would not have been a suitable companion except for sex. "How much more closely in cohabitation and conversation are two friends [amici) male friends] together;' he said, "than a man and a woman?"200 Examples of such male friendships abound. Pontius, biographer of Cyprian of Carthage, described just such a relationship between the bishop and one Caecilius: [Cyprian] had a close association [contubernium) "sharing the same tent:' also a term used for concubinage and slave marriages] among us with a just man, and ofpraiseworthy memory, by name Caecilius, andin age as weil as in honor a presbyter, who had converted him from his worldly errors to the acknowledgment of the true divinity. This man [Cyprian] loved with entire honor and all observance, regarding him with an obedient veneration, not only as the friend and comrade ofhis soul, but as the parent ofhis new life. And at length [Caecilius], influenced by his attentions, was, as weil he might be, stimulated to such a pitch ofexcessive love, that when he was departing from this world, and his summans was at hand, he commended to [Cyprian] his wife and children; so that him whom he had made a partner in the feilowship ofhis way oflife, he afterwards made the heir ofhis affection.2or

The Iove shared by two male friends was often mentioned. Prudentius, in his poetic account ofthe martyrs Emeterius and Chelidonius, used similar language of affection to describe their friendship ("faithful comradeship had ever united them") and the strength it gave them to endure their tortures. 202 Many of the martyrs were remernbered in male pairs: Marian and James, Nabor and Felix, Gervasius and Protasius, Sergius and Bacchus. 203 It is interesting that friendships should be linked so often to martyrdom, but it added to their idealized nature. John Cassian, before his establishment of an ascetic community in southern Gaul in the early fifth century, had traveled to Egypt with a companion, Germanus. He described their friendship as being "joined not by a fleshly but by a spiritual brotherhood;' and "linked by an invisible bond?'204 Even the married Paulinus of Nola could wax poetical on his friendship with Severus. "You, I say, are the greater and better part of me. You are my rest and joy. You are a pillow for my head, and a dwelling for my mind?'205 A man might have several of these close friendships over the course of a lifetime. Jerome, for example, shared a harne with a man named Bonosus in Rome during his studies there. The two later moved to Trier together as "raw recruits" in the heavenly army, according to Jerome, who

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linlced their friendship with the manliness of militarism (Trier was a military frontier headquarters of the later Roman Empire, so Jerome was playing on the theme ofbeing "shipped to the front:' although neither he nor Bonosus were actual soldiers). 206 Jerome later shared a similar relationship with Rufinus before some unlcnown incident ruptured the friendship. 207 The two became bitter enemies, each dismissing the other's literary efforts and each accusing the other of sexual vice and of heresy. Jerome called a third man, Innocentius, "the half of my soui:' using the classical metaphor for male friendships, a phrase coined by Horace, and one used by many other men in late antiquity to describe their friendships with other men. 208 Augustine had his share of such friendships, as recorded in his Confessions: first, before his conversion, with an unnamed fellow Manichaean in North Mrica; then, after his conversion in Milan, with Alypius (the sameman who enjoyed the violence of the arenas), with whom he lived and whom he called "the brother of my heart [frater

cordis mei].m09 While such friendships between Christian men were intended to promote their spiritual development, they sometimes degenerated into sinful alliances. The possibility always existed, for example, that these friendships would become sexual relationships, given the longstanding cultural tradition of pederasty, and because of the fluid sexual interests of many men of antiquity, especially unmarried men. Valerian of Cimelium in Gaul recognized this possibility, saying that some men "to excuse away the odium ofthisdetestable error, pretend that it is fun [laetitia ]" to engage in sex with their male friends, "ifthose can be called friendships." He continued: "of two such men I do not lcnow whom to call more unfortunate: the one who lives by deforming someone eise, or the one who has prostituted his body to wantonness and handed it over to moclcery.''210 A sexual friendship seems to have existed between Augustine and his first companion, he later regretted: I cared for nothing but to love md be loved. But my love went beyond the affection of one mind for mother, beyond the arc of the bright bearn of friendship. Bodily desire, like a morass, md adolescent sex welling up within me exuded mists which clouded over md obscured my heart, so that I could not distinguish the clear light of true love from the murk of lust.... I muddied the strearn of friendship with the filth oflewdness md clouded its clear waters with hell's black river oflust. 211

Equally, men's friendships were sometimes the occasion for carousing and sexuallibertinism, as seems to have been typical for adolescent males and as happened with Jerome, for instance, whose youthful companions

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became associates in his debauchery. 212 The vehemence of the Christian denunciations of sexoutside of marriage, especially of sex between males described at the beginning of this chapter may have been related to the encouragement of these friendships as alternatives to marriage. The supplanting of marriage with these friendships may also help to explain the creation at some unknown date of specific Christian rituals to honor them. 213 In some sense, what the Christian proponents of male friendships were offering to men through these literary models and rituals was a form of spiritual pederasty not unlik:e spiritual marriage, intended for the support and edification of males but without the corrupting influence of sexual relations. Christian men who eschewed marriage might also form close friendships with women. It has been argued that the Christian view of the virtue of the sexless life allowed for the possibility of friendships between men and women in a way unseen among other religions or philosophies oflate antiquity. 214 In the eastern Mediterranean, these unions had often taken the form of sexless cohabitations between male and female "celibates; the individuals in such unions were known in Greek as syneisaktoi, "those brought together;' and in Latin, as subintroducti. Bishops of the Bastern churches repeatedly condemned even sexless cohabitation; but it continued nonetheless. 215 In the West, relationships of this sort also existed, although perhaps not to the same extent, and were equally condemned by the Western authorities. Jerome railed against the women involved in such relationships (although not in this instance against the men involved), calling them "unwedded wives;' "new types of concubines;' and even "one-man harlots.''216 He demanded that individuals involved in these relationships separate at once. 217 The orthodox encouragement of spiritual marriages was in some ways a concession to the strength of such nonsexual companionships between men and women, but spiritual marriages had the advantage in being rooted in cultural traditions of marriage rather than friendship. More acceptable to the orthodox fathers were the sort of arrangements that Jerome praised when he spoke ofFabiola's arrangement with Pammachius, which I mentioned at the start of this chapter, an arrangement of mutual support but not of cohabitation. It was also the type of relationship that Jerome hirnself enjoyed with the woman he called "my Paula.''218 Jerome instructed the widow Paula and her daughters in the Christian faith, and she in turn probably financed his studies and literary career. They traveled together to the holy sites ofPalestine and Egypt, and eventually established monastic communities near each other at Bethlehem, but they never lived together. 219 Not only did Jerome participate in

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a lifelong correspondence with Paula, but he also wrote to various members of her family to encourage and instruct them in much the way that any stepfather might. 220 The young woman who died while under Jerome's spiritual guidance, it should be added, was one ofPaula's daughters. He was their spiritualpateifamilias. Jerome's relationship with Paula and her children demonstrated that a man did not have to give up the domestic affairs of family life or the authority of a husband and father when he renounced marriage; he simply elevated thern to a different plane. Agairr, there were concerns that these friendships between rnen and warnen rnight deteriorate into clandestine sexual relationships. It was rurnored about Jerome's friendships with women. 221 Jerome in turn spread rurnors about the association of his former friend, Rufinus, with various warnen whom Jerome rnocked as "warnen of ill repute" (mulierculae) and Amazons. 222 He called Rufinus "a Cato publicly but a Nero privately."223 Jerome condemned the cohabitation of sexually continent couples in principle as flirting with disaster and thought it better that even rnarried couples wishing to initiate spiritual marriages should separate. 224 Fears of the clandestine sexual nature of such friendships between men and warnen also presumably encouraged legislators to restrict intimacy between warnen and their spiritual advisors. One law ordered that "ecclesiastics or rnen of the churches or whoever that want themselves to be known by the name of [sexual] continents should not enter into the homes of widows or minor women."225 In sum, while Christian friendships might satisfy the personallanging for emotional intimacy, their participants had to guard themselves constantly agairrst a sexual involvement that might destroy the lofty ideal of the celibate lifestyle. The dangers of sex always remairred. Even the rare examples of friendship between Christian warnen merited admonition agairrst sexual involvernent. 226 Jerorne's letters to Paula's family and friends in Rome are important artifacts for the ways in which the role of spiritual advisor affered an authority comparable to that of husband and father for Christian men. Jerome sethirnself up as an advisor on rnarital questions, even though he hirnselfbad renounced marriage, and wrote often to warnen with advice on rnatters sexual. A letter survives that he wrote to a young widow named Furia, the sister of a son-in-law ofPaula, who was considering rernarriage. Jerome urged her not to "return lilce a dog to its vomit" and reenter the realm of the sexually active. 227 Instead, because she had borne no children to her deceased husband, she should rather "grieve your lass ofvirginity in vairr;' and "make a virtue of necessity.''228 He challenged her in hostile tones:

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Why plead [concern for] your patrimony as an excuse [for remarriage], or the insolence of your slaves [managed by a woman alone]? Confess your shame. No woman takes a husband in ordernot to sleep with him. And if it is not your sexual urge inciting you, what a great insanity it is to prostimte your chastity in the manner of a whore in order to increase your wealth, and for the sake of a thing vile and perishable, to let your sexual integrity [pudicitia ], which is precious and eternal, be polluted? 229

Jerome might have been anxious about Furia's spiritual welfare, but he relied on the worst Roman stereotypes of wanton women to express his concerns. Jerome's letter to Oceanus about the deceased Fabiola with which I began this chapter details the same problems involved in the remarriage of widows. Fabiola had been a political ally ofJerome's, but one who had been criticized for having married twice, so his defense of her required him to downplay the scandal ofher actions. I have already described how Jerome had impugned the character ofher first husband. Jerome also ex-, cused Fabiola's moral accountability for her remarriage and even presented it as the mostsensible choice for a woman in her position (although again relying on the same nasty stereotype of women): She was an adolescent, and could not be loyal to her widowhood. She saw that the law ofher members was refusing the law ofher mind, and that she was pulled chained and captive toward sex. She judged it better to confess openly her frailty, and to undergo the rather wretched cloud of marriage, than under the glory ofbeing a one-man woman [univira], to act Wce a whore. 230

Finally, and most importandy, he showed that she had repented of her carnal weakness: After the death of her second husband she changed herself: she wore sackcloth, she acknowledged publicly her error, and with the whole of Rome watching, at the Easter vigil in the former Lateran Palace . . . she stood among the ranks of the penitents, and with the bishop, priests, and the whole people crying with her, and with her hair disheveled, her face pale, and her hands and neck filthy, she submitted. 231

Fabiola's life after her second husband's death, her extravagant charity and care of the poor, provided further proof of the sincerity ofher repentance. In freeing herself of the marital authority of a husband, Fabiola was required to submit herself even more fully to clerical authority. That, I be-

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lieve, is crucial to understanding Jerome's relationship to the women to whom he wrote. It also sheds light on the general implications of the renunciation of marriage for men's authority- because the power that the male derical hierarchy daimed over Fabiola was as absoluteasthat daimed by any Romanhusband. It did not matterwhether women married or not, because we see in Jerome's letters to unmarried or widowed women how one type of masculine authority might readily supplant another. Indeed, the sott of patriarchal spiritual authority that Jerome daimed might be extended far beyond what was possible to Roman men in the late ancient household to anyone willing to listen and obey. Men's declining private control of women in the household might be shored up by their control in the public sphere of religion. The liberty that widows like Fabiola might have exercised was sharply curtailed by their very piety, even if that piety induded the renunciation of future marriages. Indeed, the moral exhortations of spiritual advisors lilce Jerome helped to undo any real effects of the financial independence of widows in the later empire. The same moral authority wielded over women could also be used to control men, who were as much obliged to obey derical authorities as were women. In the end, men's familial authority was rescued by its redirection into derical authority, an authority not limited by a decliningpatria potestas. Not without reason were Christian writers so vociferous in their denunciations of sexual transgressions, as described at the statt of this chapter, because these very denunciations were a means to assure the transference of familial to derical authority. Clerks acted as any Roman pateifamilias might have wished to do, seelcing to direct and correct the behavior of those individuals in his charge, especially their sexual behavior. The same might be said of the copious correspondence of Augustirre or Paulinus or any other of the Latin Christian writers, as examples of the transference of patriarchal power from husbands to spiritual advisors. Because the men of the ecdesiastical hierarchy functioned as God's representatives, they were also authorized to act as surrogate fathers on God's behalf, as patresfamilias of the Christian household. Ambrose recognized his patriarchal status: For I love you, whom I have begotten in the Gospel, no less than if you were my own true sons. For nature does not malce us love more ardently than grace. We certainly ought to love those who we think will be with us forever more than those who will be with us in this world only. 232

The patemal authority that celibate men relinquished could be supplanted to a certain degree through spiritual authority as Christian leaders and teachers.

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Men of the ecclesiastical hierarchy seemed anxious to defend their . manliness as ersatz fathers. After all, they were men who chosenot to participate in the traditional family structure, as much as they might duplicate that structure within the family of Christians. Ambrose claimed, for example, that a man's childlessness was no evidence of a lack of virility: We recognize that it happens that both infirm men have children, and strong men have none; slaves have them, but not masters; the poor have them, but those who are powerful do not.... Men should themselves understand instead that to have children or not to have them has nothing to do with potency rpotentia] but with patemal property rpatema proprietas], and that to procreate is not according to the power of our will but is [only] according to a condition [qualitas] of the body. 233

"My seed [semen] is a hundred times more fertile:' Jerome claimed in a similar but particularly self-conscious comment on a parable of Jesus, which he related to his childlessness. 234 In the final count, however, the transference of the patriarchal structure of the Roman family to the Chris-· tian community allowed these men to become patriarchs of a family that never died. The Christian leaders and writers of late antiquity were quite literally "the fathers of the Church:' a term that was first used by Vincent of Urins in the third decade of the fifth century and has been used ever since to describe them. 235 Still, the admission of sexual vice among Christians reminds us that the sexual code that patristic writers advocated was never wholeheartedly adopted even by the men for whom it was crafted. The fathers were not universally obeyed. Some men, even those who expressed a wish to live by the Standards set by the Christian authorities, fell agairrst their will into the very sexual involvements they tried to avoid, seduced by the ancient traditions of a freer male sexuality, as Augustirre confessed ofhis own adolescence. Others denied that such a sexual self-denial was required of them as Christians, among them men like Jovinian. Still others claimed to follow the new moral code but secretly continued lives of sexual vice, men such as Cyprian decried in describing the abhorrent sexual practices of married couples. Regardless of their actions, however, sexuality illustrated a host of male concerns in late antiquity: men's ties to the classical heritage, their commitment to the Christian religion, their adherence to the right set ofbeliefs about human nature, and their obedience to ecclesiastical authority. In the end, Christian men enjoyed the best of all possible worlds in an era in which men's marital relations had been brought into question. They might renounce marriage altogether as part of a heroic self-sacrifice,

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still participating in the male control of women by means of moral exhortation and ecclesiastical sanction. Even if they did marry, however, they might find support for their authority in the Christian concerns about sex and fidelity within marriage andin the metaphor ofhusband as Christ. The traditionallanguage of manliness and unmanliness aided in the popularization and assimilation of these cultural innovations, and their configuration as part of a new masculine identity, even as it defined the points of separation between pagans and Christians and between heretics and the orthodox. Christian pronouncements about sex and marriage thus provided a cmcial component of the later Roman transformation of masculinity.

CHAPTER SEVEN

IITHE MANLINESS OF FAITH" Sexual Difference and Gender Ambiguity in Latin Christian Ideology

The preceding chapters have shown how the new Christian ideology of masculinity depended on the paradox that Christian men were manliest when they abandoned the pursuits that ancient Roman tradition had lang considered manly-participation in war and politics, in sex, marriage, and family life-and pursued divergent paths to manliness. But manliness remained the end to which men strove, even if it might be delineated in different ways- as interior warfare, as ecclesiastical politics, as sexual and marital renunciation-and even if it might beredefinedas Christian virtue. The reverse also held true, as we have seen, and Christian writers denounced effeminacy in men, an age-old association between vice and unmanliness newly cast as Christian sin. The implications of these ideas will be addressed in this chapter. Orthodox Christian writers :firmly supported the age-old Roman belief in the inferiority of warnen and the superiority of men, a beliefthat helped to reassert the privileges of the group lang holding power, men of the Roman aristocracy. In order to maintain this belief, however, orthodox Christian writers were obliged to repudiate the ambiguous gender traditions and genderless ideal of groups within earllest Christianity, a stance that also required them to limit the value and infl.uence ofEastern Christian culture for Western Christians. The reaffirmation of the belief in men's superiority and women's inferiority also forced Western Christian writers to deal with virtuous Christian warnen among them, that is, warnen who challenged the longstanding connection between femininity and vice. They transformed such warnen into pseudomen, even if they denied such warnen the masculine privileges so closely guarded by "real" 206

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men. In doing so, however, they demonstrated that gender-ambiguous ideals in earliest Christianity might have some validity and purpose in orthodox belief and might be subsumed into the general paradox of Christian masculinity. MANLINESS AND HOLINESS, UNMANLINESS AND SIN

Latin Christian writers recognized that their concept ofvirtus did not correspond to the Roman tradition. I have documented numerous examples of these disjunctions in previous chapters. But Christian writers of late antiquity also taclcled this problern directly. Ambrose ofMilan drew heavily upon these contrasts in a treatise dedicated to the subject of virtus. (Ambrose also showed his debt to both of the traditions inherited by Latin Christians in the title of the treatise, De ]acob et vita beata) "On Jacob and the Happy Life;' adding the name of a Biblical hero to the title of a treatise by the classical Roman writer Sallust.) In the work, Ambrose described the virtuous man as the man who found success in less-thanideal circumstances. He wrote: What indeed is laclcing to the man who possesses the good and has virtue always as his companion and ally? In what state oflife is he not most powerful? In what poverty is he not rich? In what lowly status is he not noble? In what leisure is he not industrious? In what weakness not vigorous? In what infirmity not strong? ... In what solitude is he not in a crowd? The happy life surrounds him, grace clothes him, the garment of glory makes him radiant .... When can he appear to be downcast? His citizenship is in heaven. When can he appear not to be distinguished? He conforms himself to the likeness of the beautiful and only good; although weak in his members, he is strong in his spirit. 1

It was a description surely crafted with the problems oflater Roman men in mind. Ambrose reassured his readers that virtuous men would receive all of the things that Roman men had always hoped for: power and wealth, honors and social distinctions. But they would only obtain these things by rejecting traditional notions of masculine accomplishment. Christian writers like Ambrose relied heavily on the contrasts between what was.considered ideal according to Christian Standards and what was considered ideal according to the Standards of the "world" or the "present age" (both suitable translations of the Latin saeculum) and meaning both contemporary practice and the pagan and classical tradition). Christian writers used Biblical precedent to prove their point. The Beatitudes ofJesus were an important Biblical support often cited, offer-

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ing real triumph to those in apparent failure and future happiness to those in present misery. Chromatius of Aquileia contrasted secular and Christian virtus in a sermon on the Beatitudes given near the end of the fourth century. "It is the perfect virtue [virtus ], brothers:' he declared, and "after the service of all justice, to receive reproaches frommenon account of the truth, stricken with torments, taking as our example that of the prophets, who, beaten by various methods for the salce ofjustice, conformed themselves to the Passion of Christ and were made worthy of rewards?'2 The Biblical story of the twin brothers, Jacob and Esau, from the book of Genesis, was another opportunity for inversions of masculine expectation, as in Ambrose's treatise. God preferred Jacob (the younger of the twins and the smooth-skinned one, the one who stayed among the tents with his mother and learned to cook) to Esau (his slightly older and hairier brother, who was his father's favorite and enjoyed manly pastimes like hunting). 3 Ambrose encouraged Christian men to see themselves as Jacob figures, declaring that "Jacob was the superior in virtus."4 Further Biblical endorsement for the paradox of Christian virtue could be found in the life and teachings of the apostle Paul, who declared himself"happy to malce my wealmesses my special boast" and "content with my weaknesses, and with insults, hardships, persecutions, and the agonies I go through for Christ's sake:' because "[it is] when I am weak that I am strong?'5 Jerome, quoting this passage, added: "Who of us can claim for hirnself even the smallest part of this catalogue of virtues [virtutes] ?"6 Such Biblical examples could be endlessly multiplied. The whole of the life ofJesus as remernbered in the Gospels, culminating in his ignominious death, also demonstrated how the measure of this world was not God's measure. Through all of these contrasts between expectation and reality, the importance of paradox in the Christian message is clear. Paul frequently used paradoxes to describe the Christian reality: wealmess is strength, foolishness is wisdom, and death is victory. Christian writers of late antiquity also embraced paradox. The fifth-century poet Prudentius placed words similar to those of Paul in the mouth of the martyr Romanus, called before the tribunal of a third-century pagan emperor, and thus for the benefit of all those who read his poetry. "I know that you, godless man, cannot grasp the mystery:' he wrote. "You think this foolishness, you wise men of the world, but the supreme Father chose the foolish things of the world so that he who is foolish in respect of the world might be wise in the knowledge of God?' 7 It was through the use of paradox that Christian writers shaped their response to the multiple changes in Roman men's understanding of

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masculinity in late antiquity. The threat to masculinity in late antiquity posed by the growing distance between expectation and reality-between the military ideal of manliness and the actual collapse of the empire, between the centrality of political office to aristocratic identity and the political impotence of the aristocracy, between the ideal of patriarchal marital and familial authority and decliningpatria potestas-all could be reconciled through the creation of a kind of counterculture that interpreted disjunction as paradox and was invigorated by its dissociation from traditional standardsrather than frustrated by it. The use of paradox allowed Christian men to claim real manliness in apparent unmanliness. The unquestioned ideal, nonetheless, remained manliness. For Christian writers to appropriate the concept of virtus was to identif)r themselves with the best elements of the classical heritage. Indeed, it was to take the parts ofthat heritage that were suspect or dangeraus and tarne them. Ambrose contrasted the qualities "associated with the female sex, such as malice ofthought, petulance, sensuality, self-indulgence, immodesty, and other vices ofthat nature which tend to enervate the traits associated with what is distinctly masculine:' which he defined as "chastity, patience, wisdom, temperance, fortitude, and justice?'8 Augustine of Hippo recommended to Christians that they look for virtus in the old philosophical moral values of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice; in sum, he exhorted them to "have a virile spirit?'9 But virtus was not simply the reiteration of ancient virtue. It also represented the best of what was new to the Christian message. It was holiness, conformity of the self to divine commands; accordingly, Jesus was the virtus of God. 10 In the same fashion, Christian writers continued to dismiss what they did not like as unmanliness. In a discussion of the unsuitability of certain men for offices as Christian clerics, for example, Ambrose declared that a man's voice "should not be languid, nor feeble, nor womanish [ftmineus] in its tone?' He continued: "It should preserve a certain quality and rhythm, and a manly vigor:' and added, "I cannot approve of an effeminate [molliculum] or wealc tone of voice or gesture of the body." 11 There were certainly practical reasons for insisting that a cleric should have a strong and clear spealcing voice, and Roman writers had lang insisted on the importance of oratorical skills in men's public presence, but the association of weakness with unmanliness deserves comment. In explaining why a manly voice should be so important in a cleric, Ambrose said: "Let us follow nature; the imitation ofher provides us with a principle of training, and gives us a pattern of truth?' 12 If clerics were men, they should sound like men. Indeed, Ambrose drew frequently upon the arsenal of terms deriding unmanliness for a variety of purposes. When discussing

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the proper conduct of clerics, he suggested that a man could be happy only "when the patronage of pleasure or the fear of pain is despised" since "the first of these one abhors as poor and effeminate [infractum et molliculum ], and the other as unmanly and weak [eviratum et infirmum].''13 Ambrose reiterated this principle in a letter, a principle that any ancient Roman might have voiced: "Nothing effeminate [molliculum], nothing feeble attains to praise.'' 14 There was more to the condemnation of unmanliness, however, than the mere manipulation of a familiar and conservative vocabulary. Denunciations of unmanliness allowed the leaders of the Christian communities -as it had for classical Roman moraliststo dtaw upon gender stereotypes to encourage what they considered acceptable behavior formen by calling it manly and to discourage what they considered unacceptable behavior by calling it unmanly. Let me explain by using as my example the Christian disapproval of the public spectacles. The term "spectacle" (spectaculum) covered a wide range of public performances, including the formal and classical Greelc and Latin tragic and comedic theatrical plays; public religious rituals, both reenactments of pagan legends as weil as dances and ceremonies in honor of a god or goddess; gladiatorial and athletic contests; performances by mimes and jugglers and acrobats, solo and in groups, impromptu and rehearsed; and street dancers, including erotic dancers. There was considerable overlap between these categories of public performers, since plays based on a pagan legend might involve a sexual performance, or festivals in honor of the gods might incorporate acrobatics or a striptease, or criminals might be executed by being cast in a performance where they were actually lcilled. If our sources can be believed, there was also much overlap between the categories of performers. Actors were often treated as pimps and actresses as prostitutes, as indicated in one law of394, according to which Christian women and boys were forbidden to associate with actors, presumably because they were the most susceptible either to sexual advances from them or perhaps to abduction by them for immoral purposes. 15 The disreputability of public performers did not only exist in the minds of Christians. Public performers suffered legal infamy (infamia) according to traditional Roman law. The HistoriaAugusta and the Romanhistory ofCassius Dio both smeared the reputations of several emperors simply by mentioning their frequent association with actors, mimes, and other performers, and then adding pimps and prostitutes tothelist as if they were much the same thing. 16 Indeed, given the disdain for the spectacles among Roman writers, pagan and Christian, it is questionable to what extent the extant sources are reliable evidence for what went on at the spectacles. 17

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Christian writers worked hard to undermine the popularity of the public performances by emphasizing the gender transgressions of the spectacles. But to understand their critique, we must understand how plays were performed in late ancient Rome. First, male actors in formal plays played women's as weil as men's roles and dressed in women's clothing for these roles, although there were also female actresses in the later Roman Empire for less formal performances. Second, all actors in formal roles wore masks that hid their faces. This device permitted the same actor to play different roles in the same play simply by switching masks offstage, but it also required the graceful movements ofhands and bodies necessary either for the male actor to telegraph the femaleness of a character or to express emotion intended to be visible from a distance. Third, the content of some plays and performances, especially comedies and the skits of mimes and dancers, was often graphically sexual. All of these activities, Christian writers argued, were violations of men's proper gender roles and disgraceful displays of unmanliness. Even while they condemned the gender violations of the public performers, Christian writers also tried to show how the average man's enjoyment of the spectacles was equally unmanly. Tertullian dedicated an entire treatise to the problern ofpublic shows (De spectaculis). He denounced the unmanliness of the performers. "What must be the judgment of the pantomime;' he wondered, ''who is even brought up to play the wo man;' when in the Bible "it is declared that the man is cursed who attires hirnself in female garments?" 18 But the performers were not the sole transgressors involved in the spectacles. ''Are we not enjoined to put away from us all immorality [impudicitia] ?" he asked of his readers. "On this ground, we are excluded from the theatre, which is immodesty's own peculiar abode, where nothing is in repute but what elsewhere is disreputable." 19 A century later, Lactantius repeated virtually the same sorts of denunciations, pointed both at the performers and the viewers of performances. "The shameless [impudicissimi] motions ofthe actors;' he argued, "what eise do they teach and arouse but the passions? Their enervated bodies, softened to womanish step and effeminate apparel, belie shameless [impudicae] warnen with their dishonorable gestures.''20 And again: What of the stage? Is it less vile? There comedy discourses of debaucheries and illicit loves, tragedy of incest and parricide. The lewd gestures of actors, whereby they imitate loose women [infames feminae ], actually teach the lusts expressed in their dances. The farce too is a school ofiniquity, in which shameful things are done by representation, so that things that are true are accomplished without any sense of shame. 21

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It is not difficult to find other Christian writers voicing similar complairrts. Novatian, who wrote a treatise entitled De spectaculis in the middle of the third century, also criticized the actor as "dissolute beyend womanly softness:' calling such a man an "1-don't-know-what, neither man nor woman."22 About the same time, Cyprian of Carthage bemoaned the fact that on the stage "men emasculate themselves; all the honor and vigor of their sex are enfeebled by the disgrace of an enervated body, and he gives more pleasure there who best breaks down the man into woman.''23 As these descriptions make clear, Christian writers targeted the spectacles by claiming that they violared the traditional Roman distinction of the sexes, and that they were therefore as repugnant to watch as to enact. Any intelligent man should share their opinions, they implied. But the popular support for the spectacles belies any real support for the opinions of these writers. The continual denunciations show that these exhortations were not having the intended effect. It is irrteresring that most of the denunciations were directed at Christian men; we can only presume that such Statements were necessary because Christian men continued to artend these performances. (It is unclear whether women regularly witnessed spectacles, given the limitations on their presence in public areas.) As the Roman government became officially Christian, however, the Christian disapproval began to turn the tide agairrst the public performances. The Christian emperors enacted laws agairrst them. A law of 367 forbade actors from being admitted to communion in Christian churches, except at the end of their lives, after which, if they chanced to survive, they could under no circumstances return to the stage. A law of 399 banned aspring festival called the maiuma because of its indecency; another law of the same year rejected the presentation of "any spectacles ... devised to effeminate the spirit [ad molliendas animos]" on Sundays or on the emperor's birthday. 24 These laws, it must be noted, apparently did not succeed in reforming or eliminating either the performances or their players. At the end of the fourth century Ambrose of Milan still contrasred "the movements of the dissolute hoclies of actors" with the vigoraus mannerisms of true men. 25 The limited scope of these laws also implies that the legislators knew they were acting agairrst popular opinion and so banned only the most outrageaus of offenses. Salvian ofMarseilles criticized the continued popularity of the public games in the middle of the fifth century. "Indeed:' he lamented, "it would take long to speak about all these snares now, namely, the amphitheaters, music halls,

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public processions, jesters, athletes, tumblers, pantomimes and other monstrosities, which disgust me to talk about?'26 But Christian writers had another weapon in their arsenal to attaclc the public spectacles, which was to link the gender ambiguity of the performers to the pagan nature of the plays and festivals. "One and the same actor:' Jerome declared, "now figures as a brawny Hercules, and now relaxes into the softness of a Venus or the quivering tone of a Cybele?'27 Tertullian wondered how pagans could consider any such reenactments as pious. "When the lilceness of a god is put on the head of an ignominious and infamaus wretch, when one impure [impurum] and trained up for the art in all effeminacy, represents a Minerva or a Hercules:' he aslced facetiously, "is not the majesty of your gods insulted, and their deity defiled?"28 (The word Tertullian used for this defilement, constuprare, from the same root as stuprum, was a term often used for the sexual penetration of males.) For Tertullian and other Christian writers, the spectacles were unmanly and obscene because they were pagan. Salvian of Marseilles maintained that Minerva is worshipped and honored in the gyrnnasia, Venus in the theaters, Neptune in the circuses, Mars in the arena, Mercury in the wrestling schools .... Whatever is of an impure nature is donein the theaters. Whatever is luxurious, in the wrestling schools. Whatever is immoderate, in the circuses. Whatever is mad, in the arena pits. Herethereis wantonness [impudicitia], there lasciviousness [lascivia]. Here there is intemperance, there insanity. 29

Behind it all is the ancient rhetoric linlcing unmanliness and vice. But a new and revealing element has been added in the Christian rhetoric against paganism. Armed with their distaste for the spectacles, Christian writers toolc advantage of the opportunity to reinforce the pagan themes of the performances and to lump paganism tagether with unmanliness and sin. (The late ancient hagiographical theme of the conversion ofan actor in the middle of a pagan theatrical performance- as in the legend of Genesius, who is said to have become a Christian on stagein the midst of an anti-Christian play-reinforced the linlc between paganism, sin, and the spectacles. 30 ) Christians transformed the concept of virtus by using it to describe the paradox of Christian masculinity where true manliness might be found in apparent unmanliness. But they also still used it to distinguish manliness from unmanliness in very traditional ways and readily applied it to the persons and activities, such as public performers and the spectacles, that they

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wanted to criticize or condemn. Indeed, because they identified manliness with Christian holiness, they were also able to identifY unmanliness with sin and thus also with paganism. That identification proved to them the value of the continued equation of gender and morality. MASCULINE PRIVILEGE AND CHRISTIAN PRIVILEGE

I suggested in chapter l that manliness and unmanliness were useful categories for Roman men because they helped further the larger task ofbuttressing male social privilege. By labeling as "effeminate" the men who did not live up to the ideals of masculine behavior and demoring them into the category of women, the men who were in control were able to perpetuate the myth that they dominared their society and its men and women because of their moral superiority. I want to suggest now that the same motivation made manliness and unmanliness equally useful categories for Christian men. We have already seen numerous instances in preceding chapters in which Christians asserted their moral superiority by claiming greater manliness. By extending the cantrast between manliness and unmanliness to a parallel cantrast between Christianity and paganism, Christian men could assert their holiness and manliness as Christian men over a sinful and pagan and effeminate society. Masculine privilege rewrote itself as Christian privilege. It is clear that Latin Christian writers accepted with little apparent question the division of men into the two camps of the manly and the unmanly. Consider an episode from the Liber peristephanon by the poet Prudentius of the martyrdom of Agnes. Agnes was condemned to death in the arena for her refusal to marry, having dedicated her life to holy virginity. Agnes's willingness to face martyrdom and sexual renunciation lent her an implicit manliness. But Prudentius described her death as a symbolic marriage to the gladiator who was about to kill her: When Agnes saw the grim figure standing there with his naked sword her gladness increased and she said: "I rejoice that there comes a man like this, a savage, cruel, wild man-at~arms, rather than a listless, soft, womanish [mollis] youth bathed in perfume, coming to destroy me with the death of my honor. This lover, this one at last, I confess it, pleases me. I shall meet his eager steps halfway and not put offhis hot desires. I shall welcome the whole length ofhis blade into my bosom, drawing the sword-blow to the depths of my breast." 31

The episode relied both on the old-fashioned appeal of the manly gladiator and on the conventional disdain for the effeminate man. The juxta-

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position of these two masculine types, it should be noted, served no real purpese to the story ofAgnes's martyrdom. It even detracted from the sacredness of her virginity, malcing it seem as though she had refused to marry only because she had not found a suitor who was man enough. But Prudentius wrote his poetic account of the martyrs precisely in order to popularize these legends among Roman readers, and it was important that he have his readers see familiar and appealing patterns in his poems. From even this one example, we see that Prudentius counted on his audience's immediate recognition of the significance of the centrast between the gladiator and the perfumed youth. Christian writers knew that the success of their religion to a !arger population depended on malcing it seem both conventional and attractive. Moreover, the imagewas probably as appealing to Prudentius as to his readers. (Doubdess, the allusion to forced sexuality in the penetration of the sword also sprang from the same motivation, appealing to a violence and sexual titillation similar to that which the public spectacles offered.) The ability to divide human persons into two camps, one of moral excellence and the other of moral reprobation -or, in Christian terms, one of saindiness and the other of sin-and then to link these camps with masculine and feminine natures, proved too compelling to resist. It permitted the Church fathers and their allies to see themselves as manly in their quest for holiness and as deserving of all of the rights available in a society dominated by men. It also allowed them to disparage the persons and actions they despised, including men who were pagan or otherwise opposed to the Church fathers, as sinful and unmanly and as undeserving of the rights and authority that belonged to true men. Conventional denunciations of love of luxury were a frequent occasion among Christian writers both for the assertion of the moral superiority of men over women and for the conscious demotion of sinful men into the category of women. Prudentius again provides a helpful illustration, from another ofhis poetic works (calledAmartißenia) The Origin of Sin, it is a lengthy disapprobation of vice intended for a Christian audience). In a section devoted to the follies of fashion, Prudentius began by associating women stereotypically with the worst of their evils: For woman, not content with her natural grace, puts on a false and adventitious beauty, and as if the hand of the Lord who made her had given her a face that was unfinished, so that she must needs further embellish it with sapphires mounted on a circlet round her brow to crown it, or surround her chaste neck with strings of glowing gems, or hang a weight of green jewels from her ears, she even fastens the little white stones from sea-shells

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in her hair to brighten it, and her braided tresses are held in place by bands of gold. It would be wearisome to detail all the profane trouble matrons take, who color the forms which God has dowered with his gifts, so that the painted skinloses its character and cannot be recognized under the false hue. Suchare the doings of the feebler sex, in whose narrow mind a frail intelligence tosses lightly on a tide of sin. 32

The purpose of this denunciation is made clear in this last verse, with Pmdentius's assurance that women were the "feebler sex" with a "frail intelligence:' and implying that their correction by men lilce hirnself was necessary in order to preserve them from sin. (Pmdentius's point about women being made in the image of God, as we will see below in the theological debate on the subject, was also not innocent of deeper meaning.) In what he attributed to women, Pmdentius is not unlilce other Christian or classical writers (lilce Ambrose, for example, whose views on women and luxury were mentioned at the start of chapter 5 ). But Pmdentius also added to his harangue a claim that some men were like women in their love of extravagance. He continued: But even he who is the head and ruler of the woman's person, who governs the weak portion cut from his own flesh and bears lordship over the delicate vessel, lets hirnself go in indulgence. One sees strong men, no Ionger young, turn effeminate [mollescere] in their self-refinement, though the creator made their bodies rude and their limbs hard with bones to stiffen them; but they are ashamed tobe men. They seek after the greatest vanities to beautif)r them, so that in their lightrnindedness they dissipate their native strength. They love to wear flowing robes not made from sheep's ßeeces but of the [sillc] spoils talcen from branches of trees and fetched from the eastern world, and to overlay their hardy frames with lozenge broidery. Artifice is called in to make yarns soalced in decoctions of plants work diverse fancy patterns with threads of different colors. Beasts' coats are chosen for carding for their sofrness to the touch. One man is seen chasing hotfoot after luxuriant tunics, and weaving downy garments with strange threads from many-colored birds, another sharning hirnself by spreading womanish scents with perfumed paints and foreign powder. 33

There is nothing surprising in what Pmdentius said: the Ostentation in dress of the upper classes of the later Roman Empire was often criticized, as we have seen. More interesting is the connection between Roman cultural tradition and Christian faith in Pmdentius's claims. Men, who should exhibit a moral superiority over women as God had intended, had instead sunk to their level. There is an oblique reference to the myth

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ofAdam and Eve in the "lordship" of man over woman andin the ''weak portion cut from his own flesh;' but also a hint of regret that effeminate wealmess was not wholly removed from men in the operation. Prudentius accordingly distanced true Christian manliness from such pleasures. "What grief to think that nature's native laws should go down;' he continued, "and her gifts be carried away captive by a tyrant passion! Every power is perverted in its action, because men turn to opposite purposes all that the Omnipotent gave them to possess.''34 Nature and the Christian god worked harmoniously tagether to establish men's dominion over warnen, Prudentius argued, andin so arguing claimed that dominion for himself. One might argue that Prudentius's detailed delineation of men's and women's clothing styles betrays an unbecoming fascination hirnself with luxury, but the accusation of effeminacy had always been used to censure in another what had to be disregarded or minimized in oneself. Prudentius composed his poetry in the early fifth century, by which time Christian ideology dominated much ofRoman culture and had also absorbed much of it. But the same condemnation of effeminacy, especially as expressed in excessive luxury in clothing, can be seen from the very beginnings of Latin Christian culture. This should not be unexpected. Christian men of the third century were even more acutely aware ofhow much their future success depended on convincing Roman nahlernen that they were just like them, unthreatening because they shared their underlying values. Tertullian adopted this rhetorical strategy in applying the military metaphor to the Christian martyrs, as we saw in chapter 4, taking a familiar metaphor and adapting it for his own purposes. He did the same in an odd treatise on clothing, a treatise addressed to the men of Carthage. He called it De pallio (On the Mantle) because he felt that this simple garment (pallium) associated with philosophers and with Christian ascetics was the manliest type of clothing. Tertullian began by admitting that change was the destiny of all things of nature, clothing styles included. But not allchangewas improvement, he added. The increasingly elaborate complexity of the traditional men's toga, he explained, required far too much effort to accomplish the desired pleated look and, therefore, too much effeminate concern for appearance. Better the unstudied and manly simplicity of a plain tunic and mantle. (In an aside, Tertullian also complained about the abandonment of the manly sandal in favor ofthe effeminate shoe and boot.) The lessons that Tertullian drew from these changes in style are notable and illustrate the Christian rhetoric of unmanliness. He argued that the increased concern with appearance had contributed to the disastraus

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military and political situation of the Roman Empire in his day, because it had turned men into warnen. The loss of manliness threatened the moral fiber of the empire. Tertullian's concern for the fate of the Roman Empire may have been sincere at this point in his career, although generally he showed little appreciation for it, but the Statement was certain to strike a cord with his readers. Tertullian also used the opportunity to link unmanliness and paganism. He noted the shameful transvestism described in the pagan legends of the Greek heroes Achilles and Hercules and the Greek histories about the Assyrian ruler Sardanapalus. Their unmanly example, he added, was even imitated by the Roman emperors to the further detriment of the empire. Again, Tertullian obviously knew how to appeal to his audience's concerns. He probably wrote this treatise during or shortly after the reign ofElagabalus, when the disastraus effects ofimperial transvestism were on many men's minds. 35 "Such garments as alienate from nature and modesty:' he concluded, should simply be moclced by other men, and so "let it be allowed to be just to eye fixedly and point at with the finger and expose to ridicule by a nod" anyone who wore them. 36 The treatise adds further evidence to the anxiety provoked by men's changing clothing styles in the later empire. There was nothing new or specifically Christian in what Tertullian argued, but he tried to show throughout his writings that divine command and Roman custom happily coincided on the matter of clothing. "I find no dress cursed by God:' he wrote in a treatise on idolatry, "except a woman's dress on a man?' 37 There was indeed a Biblical prohibition against men wearing women's clothing, but it equally condemned warnen wearing men's clothing, a fact Tertullian must have known but ignored. 38 He was much more concerned about the effects of clothing on men, because he connected it to ancient Roman fears of effeminacy. Even in a treatise devoted to women's clothing styles (and Tertullian also found much to complain about in them, mostly along much the same lines as Pmdentius's later complaints ), he was also sidetracked to speak out against the various beautification procedures used by some men: to cut the beard too sharply; to pluck it out here and there; to shave round about [the mouth]; to arrange the hair, and disguise its hoariness by dyes; to remove all the incipient down all over the body; to fix [each hair] in its place with [some] womanly pigment; to smooth all the rest of the body by the aid of some rough powder or other. 39

Some men would also "take every opportunity for consulting the mirrar [and] to gaze anxiously into it" over the course of the day, he continued in his aside, just like women. 40 Such effeminate behavior not only gave

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men the appearance and mannerisms of women, which was distressing enough to him, but it also softerred their moral complexions along with their physical complexions. In this assertion we can see another attempt to combine Christian belief and Roman traditions agairrst gender ambiguity. If Christian men were to remain strong in an age of persecution, Tertullian argued, then "such delicacies as tend by their softness and effeminacy to unman the manliness of faith are to be discarded;''41 For Tertullian, the Christian man who had lost his manliness could not but fail when his virtue was tested by the threat of martyrdom. We see the conjunction of the manly image of the soldier of Christ and the unmanly image of the richly dressed, and Tertullian's !arger rhetorical strategy: both placed true Christians among the manly. To claim the support of Christian ideology for their statements about manliness and unmanliness and about gender and morality, Christian writers of late antiquity added a new and powerful component to the rhetoric of gender. They took the privileges that men's moral superiority were supposed to justify and applied these privileges to themselves as Christians. After all, if Christians were the virtuous and manly ones, then the domination that belonged to men should adhere to them. To denounce as efieminate men's appearance or clothing worked because the chargewas so old-fashioned (and we might add to this Iist ofold-fashioned appeals the Christian denunciations of sexual immorality discussed in chapter 6 ). Other men might ignore the pleas of the moralists, pagan or Christian-and they often did, in clothing styles as in sexual behaviorbut the moralists had by definition the higher moral ground. And that higher ground gave them access to the whole range oflongstanding mental associations with the concept of virtus. The link between paganism and agendered hierarchy of masculine superiority and feminine inferiority could be carried one step farther. The stigma of unmanliness drew its strength from the inferior position of women, after all, and it was in order that women as well as other men might be subordinated to men that vicious men were considered womanly. Christian writers reinforced the inferiority of women by linking femininity to paganism. Lactantius, in mocking the unreasonableness of pagan philosophy, used as his example the sexual equality that Plato had imagined in his ideal government. "Plato threw open the senate to women, allowing them to serve in the wars, to become magistrates, and to hold military commands;' Lactantius wrote. "How great will be the unhappiness ofthat city where women fill the places of men!"42 Lactantius also offered a critique of the old pagan beliefs by linking them to ferninine inferiority. He wrote:

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But among the gods we see that there are warnen, too: therefore, they are not gods. Let him who can shatter this argument. For condition so follows condition that it is necessary to admit the conclusion. And no one can shatter this argument: of the two sexes one is stronger, one weaker, for the males are more robust, the females more weak. Weakness [imbecillitas], however, does not apply to divinity; therefore, there is no female sex [in divinity] .... The final conclusion ... [must be] that they arenot gods, since there arewarnen among them. 43 Hereis to be found the misogynistic e:xtension of the link between religion and gendered inequality: paganism is of the stuff of women, Christianity, of men. Christian writers, attempting to show the irrationality of paganism, emphasized the underpinnings of a feminine ignorance beneath traditional religion and opposed it to the masculine truth of Christian ideology. Augustine, for instance, poked fun at the proliferation ofgods in Roman belief in The City ofGod: But how can I give a list, in one passage of this book, of all the names of their gods and goddesses? The Romans had difficulty in getting them into the massive volumes .... They could not even find the goddess called Segetia adequate on her own, to the responsibility for the crops from start to finish. Instead, they decided that the corn when sown should have the goddess Seia to watch over it as long as the seeds were under ground; as soon as the shoots came above the ground and began to form the grain, they were under the charge of the goddess Segetia; but when the corn had been reaped and stored the goddess Tutilina was set over them to keep them safe. Would not anyone think that Segetia should have been competent to supervise the whole process from the first green shoots to the dry ears of corn? 44 Not without significance did Augustine concentrate his attack on the pagan goddesses here, since they best represented the conjunction of femininity and spiritual ignorance. The Ieaders ofWestern Christianity quicldy embraced an accommodation with traditional Roman notions of the sexual hierarchy of men over women. Men of the Roman aristocracy who became Christians encouraged the link between virtus and the Christian religion in order to promote both it and themselves. Having accepted the links between perfection and masculinity, however, they were obliged both to defend the parallel ideas of subordination ofwomen and the denunciation ofless than perfect men as no Ionger men. We have already seen some of the results of these ideas

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in the insistence on marital inequality and in the elaboration of a masculine clerical authority. The overall result was a blankering of all of the innovations that Christian ideology affered in a profound reactionism that tied sexual difference to moral superiority and inferiority. THE GENDERLESS IDEAL IN EARLlEST CHRISTIANITY

Latin Christian writers perhaps assured the popularity and success of their ideas by linking them to longstanding Romannotions of masculine superiority and feminine inferiority. But they were obliged as a result to walle gingerly through multiple traditions of gender ambiguity in earliest and Bastern Christianity that ignored the differences between men and women. These traditions threatened to undermine the sexual and social divisions of male and female when Christianity reached the West, even if they had already been muffled in the course of the first few centuries after the death ofJesus. Reconstructing earliest Christianity, that is, Christianity as it existed before the third century, is fraught with difficulties and uncertainties. Nonetheless, it seems as though at least some of the earliest Christians seriously challenged the customary social roles of men and women. One of the earliest Christian Statements preserved is just such a challenge, attributed to Paul and according to some scholars only quoted by him from an earlier tradition: ''All baptized in Christ, you have all clothed yourselves in Christ, and there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all ofyou are one in Christ Jesus?'45 The statement fits weil enough with what we know of earliest Christianity: an abandonment of the ritual regulations of the Jewish law, including the dietary restrictions and the circumcision of infant males (thus eroding the differences between Jew and Greek), a repudiation of wealth and the value attached to status (thus eroding the differences between slave and free ), and a renunciation of marriage and the obligations offamily life (thus eroding the differences between male and female). The Statement hinted at a promise that in Christ, humanity would be returned to its mythical original unity and functioned as a comment on the Genesis legend of Adam and Eve (and although we tend to think of Eve as having been created from the rib of Adam, and therefore only a fragment of the original human being who began as and remained male, the myth more likely began as one of an androgynaus being cut in half 46 ). It was a statement both about the past and about the future, expressing the hope that all would be restored to innocence and immortality as had existed in the days before sin and death.

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But the beliefthat in Christ the diiferences between male and female were erased could also be seen as a statement about the present, that there was no Ionger a need for gender roles in the community of Christians, a genderless ideal. Whether Paul intended such an interpretation of his Statement is uncertain. He was remernbered for hispersistent attempts to end observance of the Jewish laws and circumcision, attempts that were precisely to eradicate the difference between Jew and Greek in his own day. But he also counseled married persans to remain married and unmarried persans to remain unmarried, and that implied at least a partial accommodation to existing gender roles. 47 Still, the devaluation ofmarriage and family life in some early Christian communities encouraged the elimination of gender differences, because there was little practical value to them when both women and men participated in communallife and sexual renunciation, such as occurred among the groups known as Encratites.48 In the spirit ofthe genderless ideal, some early Christian communities accepted the full participation of warnen in ritual activities alongside men, as apparently among the Marcionites and Montanists. 49 It seems that already by the second century C.E. some communities were elaborating the theme of the genderless life in Christ and the rehabilitation of a fallen humanity through complex cosmologies of divine androgyny and gender ambiguity. Some of these groups are known to scholars as Gnostic Christians, a label that encompasses a wide range of Christian sects with differing beliefs derived from the religious mythology and philosophy ofthe eastern Mediterranean, including Jewish apocryphal writings and Greek philosophy, although the usefulness of this labei has been seriously challenged. 50 Some Christians, at any rate, were imagining a cosmos filled with semidivine beings displaying a wide array of sexual characteristics. Barbelo, for example, was an androgynaus semidivine being who was separated from God through sin and lost its androgyny, becoming the feminine figure of Sophia or Achamoth and giving birth to the material world. The loss of primordial androgyny represented the kind of loss of integrity that was also part of the Genesis legend of the creation of Eve from Adam. The myth of Barbelo also implied that sexual difference was the result of sin, and the division of male from female mirrored the fragmentation of the perfect unity of the universe into multiplicity and incompleteness. It should also be noted that the sinful androgyne Barbelo became the female being Sophia, implying a link between fernininity and sin, and, because Sophia was responsible for the creation of the material world, between fernininity and carnality. 51 The link between fernininity and the material world reminds us that

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we should not think that the Christian communities that sponsored these myths promoted a sexual equality along modern lines. The genderless ideal was often interpreted as meaning that warnen might become Iike men in their pursuit of Christian holiness and desire to return to perfection. 52 The equation of holiness and masculinity was part and parcel of the ancient environment of male domination in which these groups originated and from which they drew their members. Accordingly, feminine nature was also assumed tobe what was sinful and irremediable in human nature (and patristic commentary on the wickedness ofEve preserved the same idea). Still, given the context of the prevalent gender ideology of antiquity, which understood women's nature as weakness and vice, women's abdication from a feminine identity might be construed in a positive light. It has also been suggested that there might have been a real attraction for warnen in worshipping a divinity that contained feminine as weil as masculine natures. 53 The ascetic life might also have been especially appealing to warnen, since sexual renunciation allowed for the renunciation of unwanted marriages and a hast of troubles that existed for married warnen from spousal abuse to the physical dangers of childbirth. 54 It has also been suggested that by allowing warnen to aspire to what was perceived as masculine perfection, these Christian groups ultimately undermined the ancient foundation dividing hmnanity between virtuous men and vicious woman and redefined virtue in genderless terms. 55 One indication of how common it was to link holiness and maleness as part of the genderless ideal in earllest Christianity is the existence of numerous stories of holy warnen who dressed and lived as men, the socalled transvestite saints. The earllest such legend is that ofThecla, probably dating from the second century but which made Thecla a companion ofPaul. According to the account, Thecla heard the preaching ofPaul and was converted to Christianity, vowing herself to virginity and refusing to accept an arranged marriage. Her pagan parents opposed her vow, and she was obliged to fiee from them dressed as a man. Still disguised as a man, she was baptized by Paul and traveled with him, preaching and converting others to Christianity, even narrowly escaping martyrdom when arrested by the local governor. There were many similar legends that appeared in the eastern Mediterranean in the following centuries, and they have been extensively studied by modern scholars. 56 In each of them, the link is made clear between the pursuit ofholiness and the renunciation of a feminine identity, both subsumed under the rubric ofbeing "clothed in Christ." The cross-dressing of these warnen is typically linked with the

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moment ofbaptism, and they invariably renounce sex or marriage at the same moment, reinforcing the connections between femininity, carnality, and sin. A few of the transvestite saints are even depicted as prostitutes before their conversion, in an obvious symbolic parallelism between their feminine nature and sexual immorality, on the one hand, and their masculine nature and holy chastity, on the other. Most scholars feel that there is little historical evidence for the lives of these warnen who disguised themselves as men, and some scholars have dismissed the legends as retellings ofliterary romances or as doctored pagan myths or even as male fantasies. 57 But it must not be assumed that such warnen did not exist, even if the legends of the transvestite saints are not accurate refiections of the details of their lives. The phenomenon of warnen disguising themselves as men is common enough in later historical periods, and the freedom of action and movement that is a central theme to these stories would have been a powerful motivation (although the account ofEgeria offers the example ofa woman with sufficient financial resources who did not have to dress as a man to travel extensively, and there are other such examples). 58 In any event, the legends themselves were real enough and affered to warnen at least an imagined escape from the restrictions of their gender role through a renunciation of their gender identity. And the proliferation of these legends also points to the acceptability of a certain amount of gender ambiguity as part of the Christian message. The strength of the genderless ideal in earliest Christianity can also be seen in the concerted efforts made against it. By the end of the second century, for example, additions had been made to the collected writings of Paul that "corrected" some of the unfortunate tendencies of his authentic letters. lncluded among these emendations were the so-called hausehold texts, mentioned in chapter 6, that enforced the conventional lines of the social hierarchy, including masters' authority over slaves and husbands' authority over wives. A few lines may also have been inserted into one ofPaul's letters to the Christian community at Corinth that addressed the issue of gender ambiguity, apparently in light of the fact that women who were virgins were uneavering their heads in the churches, and even cutting their hair short, as men did, probably as a visible sign of their gender ambiguity. Schalars have debated the authenticity of the passage, in part because it seems to contradict Paul's comments about "no moremale orfemale in Christ." In this passage, Paul (or someone writing as Paul) affirmed the superiority of men over warnen by means of the issue of veiling:

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A man should certainly not cover his head, since he is the image of God and reflects God's glory; but woman is the reflection of man's glory. For man did not come from woman; no, woman came from man; and man was not created for the sake of woman, but woman was created for the sake of man. That is the argument for women's covering their heads with a symbol of the authority over them .... Ask yourselves if it is fitring for a woman to pray to God without a veil; and whether nature itself does not tell you that long hair on a man is nothing to be admired, while a woman, who was given herhairas a covering, thinks long hair her glory? 59

The ideas expressed in this passage would have great influence on the development of a Christian ideology that emphasized the continuation of a separate and subordinate role for women. The leaders of the more conservative Christian churches attempted to undermine the strength and appeal of Christian sects that emphasized the genderless ideal with reference to such passages. Developing notions of masculine clerical authority in the second century aided them in their attempts to declare such groups heretical. 60 Still, the genderless ideal that existed among some early Christians continued into the third century and was talcen up by other Christians. Notahle among these later groups was the catechetical school at Alexandria in Egypt, led in the early third century by Origen, where both women and men were educated. Origen troubled over the same issue of the reflection of God's imageinhuman beings and the connection of sexual difference to that reflection. It is difficult to do justice to Origen's ideas in brief. It must suffice to say that Origen, influenced by NeoPlatonism, believed that the material world was only a dim shadow of what was spiritual and real, and he suggested that human beings would shed sexual difference along with other aspects of their material existence when they returned to God. Human nature was in its origins and destiny a genderless one. 61 The bridal imagery that Origen crafted and the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs as representing the intimacy of the divine and the soul that inspired the later patristic writers was part of this genderless ideal. It is possible that Origen was influenced in this line of thought by Christian writings usually described as Gnostic, which outlined in great detail the bridal embrace of the feminine and masculine divine principles, or by related rituals, even if that influence was Origen's critical response to those ideas or practices. 62 The discrediting of Origen at the end of the fourth century (a century and a half after his death) can be understood at least on some level as the continuation of a long process

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of ridding Christian ideology of its genderless ideal (more about the condemnation ofOrigen below). It must be admitted that for early Christians, "no more male or female" often meant "no more female." But even if the genderless ideal in earliest Christianity was understood mostly as a call for warnen to become men, the idea that warnen might chose to abandon their gender identity and all its limitations and restrictions was still a challenge to the sexual hierarchy. It was enough of a challenge, moreover, that it was contesred and undermined as Christians accommodated themselves to and drew followers from the male-dominared societies araund them. But it was achallenge that survived, even piecemeal. As the aristocratic Romans of the western Mediterranean "clothed themselves in Christ;' their leaders were obliged to tailor the gender ambiguity of the earliest traditions of their new religion to fit themselves. WOMEN BECOMING MEN IN THE CHRISTIAN WEST

The male writers of the Western churches generally followed the bishops of the Bastern churches and denounced the gender-ambiguous traditions of some of the earliest Christians as heretical. Bven so, they were obliged to take these traditions into account in formulating their own ideology of sexual difference, even if only to criticize them. Accordingly, the male Christian writers admired virtuous Christian warnen and were even willing to compare them to men. But they also insisted that such "honorary men" should be denied any of the privileges of actual men. In doing so, they minimized the threat that the genderless ideal posed to the sexual hierarchy and to their own masculine privilege. Already by the end of the second century, some of the Bastern Christian sects that encouraged the elimination of social differences between men and warnen or who held beliefs in androgynaus or feminine spiritual beings had a disturbing presence in the western Mediterranean. Marcion, for example, taught for a while at Rome. The "Gnostic" Christian teacher Valentinus moved from Alexandria in Bgypt to Rome in the middle of the second century and attracted a large following in the capital, and he was only one of several such teachers. Hippolytus of Rome condemned his teachings at the end of the century. Irenaeus ofLyons in Gaul also wrote against the "Gnostics" and other Christian sects that he considered heretical in the same century, noting that local incursions of their preachers were attracting converts. 63 Both critics ridiculed the gender-ambiguous elements in such Christian beliefs. 64 Irenaeus also suggested that warnen were particularly susceptible to such errors. He added

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an ad hominem attaclc, repeating a rumor that one of the early female leaders of"Gnostic" Ghristianity had been a prostitute at Tyre. 65 The association ofheresy with feminine frailty, especially a gender-ambiguous heresy, had an obvious attraction for Western Ghristian writers, and the charge of sexual immorality against heretics would have a long history after Irenaeus. The Montanists were also preaching at Garthage by the beginning of the third century, and Tertullian was eventually converted to their beliefs, as were other North Mrican Ghristians. 66 We do not have sufficient sources, however, to lcnow the numbers of adherents belonging to any of these sects in the Latin West. Still, we lcnow that their ideas had penetrated somewhat in the West. An anonymaus secondcentury Western writer considered orthodox wrote the following, a neat summary of the genderless ideal: "In response to someone who aslced him when his lcingdom would come, the Lord hirnself declared: 'When the two become one, when the exterior becomes lilce the interior, and when between male and female there will be neither male nor female.' " 67 There are no examples of holy transvestites in the Latin West, that might expand our lcnowledge about the genderless ideal there, but an episode in the life ofPerpetua, a woman who was martyred at Garthage at the statt of the third century, does offer something of a parallel experience. The account is written in the form of an autobiography, with an introduction and conclusion, including the description ofPerpetua's death, added by another hand. The author recorded a dream she had while in prison awaiting death, a dream that involved her triumph over the Devil as a wrestler in the arena. She described her vision: My clothes were stripped off, and suddenly I was a man [et facta sum masculus]. My seconds began to rub me down with oil (as they are wont to do before a contest). Then I saw the Egyptian on the other side .... We drew close to one another and began to let our :fists fly. My opponent tried to get hold of my feet, but I kept strilcing hirn in the face with the heels of my feet. Then I was raised up into the air and I began to purnmel hirn without as it were tonehing the ground. Then when I noticed there was a lull, I put my two hands together linking the :fingers of one hand with those of the other and thus I got hold of his head. He fell flat on his face and I stepped on his head. The crowd began to shout. 68

The image is strilcing in its manliness as much as in its violence, but it was only a momentary gender inversion. None of Perpetua's other visions (she climbs a dangeraus ladder into Heaven, she helps her long deceased younger brother get a drinlc ofwater) challenge the gender hierarchy in

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the same way, except in the sense that they also highlight her agency. Women's writings from late antiquity are too few to draw any firm conclusions, but we have no other examples of such gender-ambiguous visions to know whether they represented a common experience. Tertullian also gave evidence for the unsettling effects of the genderless ideal among Christians in the first years of the third century. He devoted a treatise to the criticism of Christian virgins who unveiled themselves in churches, warnen who perhaps wished to make visible their gender ambiguity in ignorance or defiance of the Pauline views on veiling. Tertullian suggested that "females, subjected as they are throughout to men;' should not be unveiled for two reasons: because their visibility was a sexual temptation to men, and because men had no comparable sign of their virginity. "How, then;' he wondered, "would God have failed to malce any such concession to men;' since men were closer to God, he said, following Pauline logic, "being His own image?"69 Tertullian also condemned virginal warnen who cut their hair, joking that "close-cut hair is graceful to a virgin in like manner as that flowing hair is to a boy." 70 (We know from his comments on clothing, mentioned above, what he.thought about male gender ambiguity.) He refused to admit any truth in the Counterargument that virgins were no langer warnen, perhaps responding to articulated Statements to that effect. 71 Tertullian also linlced his opposition to women's appearance to their exclusion from ecclesiastical authority. "It is not permitred to a woman to speak in the church, but neither is it permitred her to teach:' he quoted, also from Paul, then added his own prohibitions, "nor to baptize, nor to offer [the Eucharist], nor to claim to herself a lot in any manly function, not to say in any sacerdotal office?m lt is possible that some Christian warnen in his area were doing precisely what he denounced. lt is also clear that Tertullian objected to warnen appearing in public as men because it led to their acting in public as men, specifically, their exercising of ecclesiastical authority. lt is not surprising, then, that in another treatise on women's clothing, Tertullian began by remindingwomen that the first human sin had been commitred by Eve, that they were "the Devil's gateway:' "the first foresalcer of the divine law;' and that their social inferiority was a perpetual expiation for that sin. 73 In general, Tertullian refused to accept the genderless ideal insofar as it promoted women's social equivalence to men. He refused to accept the veracity of the legend ofThecla's campanionship with Paul and her transvestism, for example. 74 He also wrote against the Marcionists, complaining that their warnen performed some ritual functions Tertullian feit should have been reserved for men.75 N onetheless, Tertullian did not entirely reject the genderless ideal. He

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ridiculed, for example, the idea of some Christian groups that there were both feminine and masculine spiritual beings.76 The spiritual world was beyond sexual difference, he maintained, because it was beyond sexuality. Hewrote: I have to return after death to the place where there is no more giving in marriage, where I have to be clothed upon rather than to be despoiled,where, even if I am despoiled of my sex, I am classed with angels-not a male angel, nor a female one. There will be no one to do aught against me, nor will they then find any male energy in me. 77

The discrepancy between his statements is clear. Even while he refused to accept gender ambiguity in women, presumably because it led to women's usurpation of masculine privileges, Tertullian was willing to accept his own gender ambiguity, the idea that he might have no sexual characteristics in the life-to-come. In another treatise, on the subject of the soul (De anima ), Tertullian repeated his argument that the soulwas genderless, maintaining that it received sexual difference only when it received a body and that sexual difference was therefore an accident ofbirth. 78 He also mocked anyone who held that sexual difference remained after death, even if that meant a masculine perfection, imagining a ludicrous life for a gendered male soul along the lines of the life of a Roman man: Must it employ itself in school studies in its passage from infancy to boyhood; play the soldier in the excitement and vigor of youth and earlier manhood; and encounter serious and judicial responsibilities in the graver years between ripe manhood and old age? Must it ply trade for profit, turn up the soil with hoe and plough, go to sea, bring actions at law, get married, toil and labor, undergo illnesses, and whatever casualties of weal and woe await it in the lapse of years? 79

There is a profound contradiction here. Even as Tertullian had argued that women should not talce up roles of public ecclesiastical authority because sexual difference did matter, he argued that Christians who believed in gendered spiritual beings were wrang because sexual difference did not matter. Perhaps Tertullian hirnself was aware of this contradiction, because it was at the time of these last writings that he abandoned in part his opposition to women's ritual roles, even celebrating the divine gift of prophecy in a Montanist woman and the public voice it afforded her. 80 It was also perhaps because of this contradiction that he became increasingly uncomfortable with marital and sexual relations as being incompatible with the genderless life that awaited all Christians.

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Tertullian's legacy to the Latin writers a:fter him was, therefore, a legacy of contradiction about the importance of sexual difference to Christian ideology. On the one hand, Tertullian developed some of the most Iasting images of gendered religious thought, the masculine soldier of Christ and the feminine daughter ofEve, images that supported the Iangstarrding views in men's superiority and women's inferiority. On the other hand, he refused to admit any real spiritual importance to sexual differentiation, imagining a genderless life of the soul. I can only speculate that allowing the elimination of.future sexual difference was much less dangerous than allowing the elimination ofpresent sexual difference, because the latter required social as well as ideological change. We can reckon that it was unpalatable for him to have argued otherwise, not only to hirnself and to other male formulators and teachers ofChristian ideology but also to male listeners. All of the Christian sects in Tertullian's day were threatened with extinction through persecution and all had to compete with each other as well as with other religions to gain converts, and Christian ideology had tobe popular if it was to survive. Notions of male superiority and female inferiority were too deeply embedded in Roman cultural values for a religious philosophy arguing for their eradication to have succeeded in the West, even if that eradication had roots in earliest Christianity. Admitting the possibility of gender ambiguity in the soul while condemning it in the body was a means of rendering the genderless ideal of earliest Christianity quaint but harmless. We can better evaluate the contradictory legacy of Tertullian if we jump ahead to the debates that were carried on at the end of the fourth century over the place of sex and marriage in contemporary Christian life. Orthodox fathers like Ambrose and Jerome were advocating precisely that Christians should do away with the trappings of gender roles in renouncing marriage and family life, and that meant also doing away with some of the substance of gender roles in women's inferiority to men. The orthodox fathers of the late fourth century argued that customary social roles revealed the fundamental natures of men and warnen. Jerome said that it was a woman's "duty" or "obligation" (officium) to become a mother. 81 Ambrose also suggested that "men have their duties [munera], and warnen have their separate offices [officia]; the generation of human succession belongs to a woman: it is impossible to a man?' 82 At the same time, Ambrose and Jerome encouraged warnen and men to abandon these obligations and enjoined on them the excellence of virginity and celibacy. For a man, the renunciation of sex and marriage was simply to find the perfection that was inside him as a man and to realize his virtus. Fora woman, in contrast, marital and sexual renunciation was to aban-

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don both her social role, her customary functioning as a daughter, wife, and mother that defined her life, as well as her ideological role, the inferior position she held in relation to men and her carnal feminine nature. ''A virgin is no Ionger called a woman;' Jerome stated simply. 83 To some extent, the orthodox fathers were willing to admit that virgin women were men. The word vi1;go (virgin) was derived from vir (man), Jerome maintained. 84 Ambrose, likewise, described virtuous Christian widows with the masculine image of veteran soldiers, laying aside their arms after their long battle against the flesh. 85 He used Judith as a role model for women of his day, describing how she triumphed militarily over a man in masculine terms (although he never referred to her excellence as virtus but instead used the term honestas, meaning "honor, repute, respectability"). 86 And Ambrose wrote of the virgin martyr Agnes that she was "in virtue above nature;' (this time using the word virtus, so that it could also be translated "a manliness beyond her nature"), apparently meaning her feminine nature. 87 And if the virginal ideal was angelic, it was also masculine: angels, who were supposed tobe beyond sexual difference, were mostly imagined as men, as can be seen in the numerous descriptions ofMary's fright at seeing astrangeman in her bedroom when the angel Gabriel appeared to her. 88 A Latin translation of the legend ofEugenia, one of the holy transvestites of the eastern Mediterranem, possibly translated at the end of the fourth century by Rufinus (an associate ofboth Ambrose and Jerome), reiterated this connection between women's virginity and manliness. In the legend, Eugenia explained why she dressedas a man: So great is the virtue of His name, that even women standing in fear of Hirn might obtain a masculine dignity. Nor might either sex be found superior in faith, since the aposde Paul, who is the teacher of all Christians, says that with the Lord there is no difference between male and female, but all of us are one in Christ. His precept I have adopted with a fervent spirit, and from the confidence which I have in Christ, I did not want to be a woman, but preserving an immaculate virginity with the whole intention of my soul, I have acted in Christ constandy as men do. For I have not wealdy assumed an appearance of honor, so that as a man I might seem to be a woman, but as a woman, I have acted manfully as men do, embracing boldly the virginity that is in Christ. 89

The repetition of these Bastern legends in the western Mediterranem popularized the notion that women were capable of"ascending" to masculine virtue by renouncing sex. (There are other indications that the legends of the holy transvestites circulated in the West. The Greek name

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Pelagia and elements ofher legend were translated, for example, into the Latin name and legend of Marina, both names meaning "of the sea." And the Greek legend ofEuphrosyne, a name meaning "joy:' was recast as the Latin legend of Castissima, a name meaning "most chaste?' 90) Nonetheless, the orthodox fathers also clarified that women became men only in a metaphorical sense and that Roman women who were Christian should not try to imitate the holy transvestites and attempt to pass as actual men. Jerome wrote to condemn transvestite women in a letter to one ofhis female correspondents from 384. "Other women change their garb and put on men's dress; they cut their hair short and lift up their chins in shameless fashion:' he complained, adding that "they are ashamed to be what they were born to be-women.''91 About the same time, Ambrose said much the same, reminding women of Paul's words against cutting their hair and unveiling themselves. 92 In 390, the Western emperor Valentinian II issued a law against virgin Christian women who cut their hair, calling it "against divine and human laws" and threatening with expulsion any bishops who letsuch women into their churches. 93 The reasons for such condemnations are clear. If women appeared and acted in public as men, then the basis for a gender hierarchy of men over women would be destroyed, and along with it, masculine clerical privilege. So Jerome and Ambrose were also obliged to say that sexual difference both did and did not matter. This conclusion was similar to their consensus on marriage, as I argued in chapter 6, where theywere also obliged to maintain that marriage both did and did not matter, and was neither to be praised insofar as it did not matter nor condemned insofar as it did matter. Within a few years, the orthodox fathers were obliged to correct themselves and say that sexual difference mattered even in a spiritual sense and was part even of the life-to-come. The turnabout happened because of a dispute involving Origen's ideas. Both Jerome and Ambrose had borrowed heavily from the ideas of Origen, including his belief in the ultimate disappearance of gender difference. At the end of the fourth century, however, Origen's ideas came under attack and were condemned as heretical, at first only in Egypt and then throughout the Mediterranean. His unique adaptation of Platonic body-soul dualism was feit to undermine the ascetic rehabilitation of the body, both in the sense of the ultimate goodness of the body and in the spiritual usefulness of asceticism, and to ignore the beliefthat human beings were made in the image of God. 94 Ambrose died about the time that the controversy erupted, but Jerome found hirnself at the epicenter of it. Among its other results, the controversy turned Jerome and Rufinus from friends to bitter enemies.

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We can see the effects of the Origenist controversy on Jerome's ideas about sexual difference in the life after death. Before the controversy, Jerome's opinion on the subject had been that the glorified soulwas masculine, an opinion that did not follow Tertullian's but that fit with the general patristic consensus that holiness was male. After death, human beings would become like the angels (something Origen had also believed), and that meant bodies without sexual difference, glorified and masculine bodies. 95 After the controversy, Jerome was forced to reverse his opinion. "Just as among angels there is neither male nor female:' he had once said, "so let us also, who shall be as angels, begin to be right now on earth what has been promised shall be in heaven?' Bur such remarks later required clarification. "When I say: 'Let us begin to be here on earth: I am not doing awaywith the nature of the sexes; but I am doing away with lust and copulation between busband and wife?'96 Within a few years, Jerome was even putting his old ideas in the mouth ofhis opponent in order to discredit him. "Will there be sexual difference between male and female or not?" he claimed to have asked Rufinus about the afterlife. "If there will be, then it follows that there will be marriage and sex and reproduction. If there will not be, if sexual difference is suppressed, then it is not the same bodies which will rise up?' 97 The reasons for Jerome's about-face are clear. Rufinus had claimed that Jerome could not have believed that the human body was made in the image ofGod, ifhuman beings created both male and female were indistinguishable by sex in the afterlife. Accordingly, Jerome was forced to argue that women remairred women in the next life. Jerome complained that women who disagreed with his revised position "talce pleasure in seizing their breasts, patting their bellies, pointing to their loins, thighs, and smooth chins and saying: 'What does it benefit us if this frail body rises again?"'98 But the implications ofJerome's revised position were revolutionary. The presence of women in the afterlife meant either that wealcness and imperfection existed there, something impossible to admit, or that women were capable of perfection as women. The latter opinion was equally unthinkable, because it undermined the association between perfection and masculinity and the theoretical basis for male superiority. It was a critical moment for the Christian ideology of gender and sexual difference. It meant that the words "in Christ, there is no male or female" could not be safely removed to a future existence, but had relevance for present existence and might be used as an argument for women's assumption of social equality. Augustirre ofHippo, who entered the debate about sexual difference at the beginning of the fifth century and thus after the debate had begun,

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showed the same inconsistencies that the Origenist controversy had brought to light. He condemned Origen's teaching that sexual difference was the result of sin and that it would disappear in the life-to-come. 99 His The City ofGod, written years after the Origenist controversy, contained a lengthy discussion of sexual difference in the afterlife. "Some people suppose that women will not keep their sex at the resurrection; but, they say, they will all rise again as men:' he wrote. "For my patt, I feel that theirs is the more sensible opinion who have no doubt that there will be both sexes in the resurrection?'100 N onetheless, Augustine had written about a decade earlier (but still after the condemnation of Origen) that women were made in the image of God only to the extent that they were human and not female. He exhibited obvious discomfort in reconciling the two views, both ofwhich were based on Biblical precedent: [Genesis] says that human nature itself, which is complete in both sexes, has been made after the image of God, and it does not exclude women from being understood as the image of God .... How then did the aposde Paul] declare that man is the image of God, and consequendy is forbidden to cover his head, whereas a woman is not, and on this account is commanded to cover hers? The solution, I think, lies in that which I already said when discussing the nature of the human mind: the woman together with the man is the image ofGod, so that the whole substance is one image. But when one distributes functions and she is assigned as a helpmate, a function which pertains to her alone, she is not the image of God. However, in what pertains to man alone, he is the image ofGod just as fully and completely as he is joined with the woman into one. 101

In other words, to the extent that what defines a woman per se (that is, whatever is female, including the female patts of her body) and is not shared by a man as patt of their common humanity, it is not in the image of God. In contrast, whatever defines a man (both what is human about him and what is male) is in God's image. This solution to the exegetical problern even allowed Augustine to reinforce the command about veiling. "Because the woman differs from the man by her bodily sex:' he said, "she can in conformity with religious custom symbolize by her corporeal veil ... that the image of God does not remain except in that patt of the human mind in which it clings to the contemplation and inspiration of the eternal values?' 102 Having defended the spiritual inferiority of women, however, Augustine was also required to defend how he could believe that women would continue to exist in the life-to-come (and here we have to jump bade to

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his remarks in the The City of God to see how he extricated hirnself from that dilemma). Women in Heaven, he suggested, would be unlilce women on Earth. ''All defects will be removed from those bodies;' he suggested, although "their essential nature will be preserved;' because "a woman's sex is not a defect; it is natural?' 103 They would still be women, but unrecognizable as such, because even their genitals would be transformed, removed as markers of imperfection. Augustine refused to take the'logic of eternal sexual difference to its logical conclusion, that it implied women's and men's spiritual equality, and continued to argue for the inferiority of women to men. Even in comments on the original sin of Adam and Eve, Augustine suggested that the Devil "no doubt start[ed] with the inferior of the human pair;' thereby implying that the inferiority and weakness of women even existed before sin and was not, as Tertullian suggested, the consequence of sin. 104 For Augustine, the "neither male nor female in Christ" meant only that "women too have some virile quality whereby they can subdue feminine pleasures, and serve Christ?' 105 Sexual difference might be patt of God's design for humanity, Augustine concluded, but it did not require sexual equality. It is interesting to see how Jerome and Augustine reconciled these seemingly opposite beliefs about perfection and sexual difference. Their response, indeed, seems to have been an even greater insistence that women ought to pursue manliness in their pursuit of holiness. On the surface, this attitude seems a blatant disregard for the implications of their own arguments, but perhaps it was not. Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine all corresponded with aristocratic women and encouraged them to begin or continue lives of consecrated, that is, permanent asceticism. The dedicated ascetic life for women of the upper classes was still a novelty in the western Mediterranean at the end of the fourth century. Ambrose's sister Marcellina and Jerome's friend Paula were among the first aristocratic women in Rome to adopt the ascetic life in the late fourth century. In contrast, it had been known in the eastern Mediterranean at least since the beginning of the century and probably earlier. 106 In the East, female asceticism was an organic institution, growing out of the same environment that produced the genderless life of sexual and marital renunciation and often linked with the heretical sects of Christianity that forbade sex and marriage. In the West, in contrast, female asceticism was as much a product of patristic encouragement as it was an expression of women's spirituality, although it was obviously both. I would suggest that the orthodox fathers supported female asceticism at least in patt as a practical resolution to the contradiction between perfection and sexual difference brought to the surface by the Origenist controversy (although

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their initial support for it predated the controversy and began in a general encouragement of virginity; so their supportwas not solely a response to this intellectual dilemma). Even if Jerome and Augustirre were forced to admit that "no more male or female" meant real spiritual equality between men and warnen, female asceticism helped to take the stirrg out ofthat admission. The ascetic ideal for warnen meant that warnen were encouraged to remain secluded within the hausehold environment in disciplined and restricted lives. (The ascetic ideal for men meant something eise altogether, as we will see in chapter 8.) Ascetic warnen were repeatedly exhorted tobecome men and praised for having become men, and it was implied that this transformationwas happening in the here-and-now. But these ascetic warnen were men who were removed from public life and subjected to the patemal clerical authority I described in chapter 6. They were men without social privilege. The exhortation to asceticism was addressed especially to aristocratic warnen, whose political connections and access to wealth meant that they were likeliest to influence ecclesiastical affairs. The Church fathers were even willing to extend to virgins the title they themselves proudly wore, brides of Christ. It might seeman odd thing to do, given the political powerthat the image had provided for the Christian bishops, but in so doing, the Church fathers were able to tap _into a conservative rhetoric about the behavior appropriate to married warnen and, thus, to virginal brides ofChrist. Same were able to recommend that Christian virgins wear bridal veils, finding yet another reason to dissuade virgins from unveiling themselves in the churches. 107 And some were even able to appeal to the jealousy of their collective husband, Jesus, who did not like to see them going about in public, as a means of enforcing women's seclusion. 108 In a treatise on virgins, Ambrose exhorted his sister and her companions to follow the example ofMary, the mother ofJesus, who was the first and best model of consecrated virginity: there was "nothing forward in her words, nothing unseemly in her acts:' and "she was unaccustomed to go from harne, except to church?' 109 Drawing from the Biblical episode in which the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, he noted that "when saluted she kept silence, and when addressed she answered, and she whose feelings were first troubled afterwards promised obedience?' 110 Ambrose also drew heavily on the Song of Songs to impress upon his female readers the intimacy they would have with Christ as his brides. Jerome repeated much the same sort of exhortations with the same references to the bridal metaphor in his letters to Christian virgins (such as the one to Eustochium: "do not seek the Bridegroom in the streets"m), as did Augustirre in his writirrgs on virginity. If men shared

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the honorific title of bride of Christ with warnen, in other words, it was in order to avoid sharing a public voice with them. Excellent examples of the transformation of the ascetic life of warnen are provided by the two Melanias, Melania the Eider (born about 340) and her granddaughter, Melania the Younger (born about 380). Both warnen were of the senatorial dass at Rome, but both abandoned their wealth and status for ascetic lives as Christian widows, and both eventually established themselves at Jerusalem. The elder Melania was among the first circle of ascetic noblewarnen in Rome, which included MarcelIina and Paula. She was a close companion to Rufinus and sided with him in the Origenist controversy, to Jerome's great displeasure, who had earlier described her as a second Thecla. 112 Paulinus ofNola praised the elder Melania after she stayed with him and his wife in her travels: "What a woman she is, if one can call so virile a Christian a woman!" 113 The younger Melania followed closely in her grandmother's footsteps, but one can see how the opportunities for ascetic warnen had been restricted in the generation that separated them. She had desired to remain a virgin from her childhood, we are told in the account ofher life, but was married by her parents' wishes. She eventually persuaded her husband to renounce sex and transform their marriage into a spiritual one (it is important, of course, that she was presented as negotiating such an arrangement with her husband, rather than initiating it through a unilateral vow). The account of Melania the Younger's life, written about the middle ofthe fifth century by Gerontius and circulating in both Latin and Greek versions, also insisted on her spiritual manliness. "In truth, she had been detached from the female nature;' he exclaimed, "and had acquired a masculine disposition, or rather, a heavenly one." 114 The more detailed record of the younger Melania allows us to see what exactly that supposed manliness entailed. Gerontius noted her piety and her humility and assured his readers that Melania never uneavered her head, "even for a short while?' 115 Gerontius was unable to avoid mention of how many times Melania had left her monastery, although he did add that she "struggled mightily'' with her decision to do so, but she even traveled as far as Constantinople and preached in public against the teaching of Nestorius: "she did not cease tallcing theology from dawn to dusk.'' 116 (The mention of a woman preaching, even orthodox ideas, was presumably necessary to clear Melania of possible charges of sympathy to Nestorian ideas, given her friendship with the Bastern ernpress Eudocia. 117) Vrrtuallyall mentions ofholywomenfrom the earlyfifth century-all written by men-include an avowal oftheir spiritual masculinity. Ausonius wrote of his aunt: "The feminine sexwas always hateful to you, and

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out of it sprang a love of consecrated virginity.'' 118 Prudentius in his Peristephanon referred to the martyr Eulalia's "holy courage" and "bold spirit" when "female as she was she challenged the weapons of men;" 119 But it was always a masculinity without practical result. It did not even have visible consequence, since patristic writers in the early fifth century continued to insist that virgins remain veiled in the churches. Paulinus ofNola daimed both that a virgin woman "leaves behind the boundaries of her womanly wealcness, and aspires to human perfection;' but she should still cover her head, because "she becomes pregnant with the spirit;' (presumably, this spiritual pregnancyundercut her claim to virginal status ). 120 The implications of this rhetoric are clear. It did not matter that sexual difference might continue to exist in the afterlife, because any woman who merited the eternal reward had already become a man. According to this logic, there were still no women in Heaven. The exact nature of masculinity and femininity and its relation to other aspects ofhuman existence and even to human destiny and salvationwas obviously a matter of no small debate among Christians oflate antiquity. But Latin Christian writers showed little enthusiasm for conceptualizing a genderless humanity as some of the earliest Christians had done. Rather, their writings continually reaffirmed the separate identities of men and women and perpetuated the conflation of sexual and moral differences. Even when they admitted that the gender-ambiguous traditions of earliest Christianity meant that women might achieve a manliness of sorts, they undermined that tradition by withholding from manly women any of the benefits associated with masculine identity. Still, the patristic praise of the manliness of consecrated virgins gave evidence that gender ambiguity continued to find a place in late ancient Christianity. SANCTITY AND GENDER AMBIGUITY

The ability of Christians to defend the manliness of their faith and to perpetuate the gender hierarchy was critical to their eventual success among the aristocracy of the later Roman Empire. Even within this intellectual environment, however, alternative understandings of the effects ofChristian ideology on gender roles and sexual difference existed, and existed even in the West. The repeated condemnations of virginal women who refused to wear veils in the churches or who cut their hair short because they no longer saw themselves as women, into the fifth century, for example, hints at an ineradicable opposition by some Christian women to the patristic views on feminine identity. An equal challenge was the willingness of some Christian men to acknowledge that the tradition of "no

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moremale or female" meant that in order to pursue holiness as Christians they would have to abandon their masculine identity. The patristic model of Christianity proved successful, I have argued, because it was conservative in the truest sense of the word, preserving the classical tradition of a hierarchy ofmen over warnen and the clear-cut distinction between the two, a tradition otherwise brought into question by the many social changes of late antiquity. Men were attracted to Christianity because they found in it a means to reaffirm their manliness and to reclaim their separateness from and domination of warnen. But not all men were attracted for this reason. The men who became Montanist Christians, for example, did so knowing that it allowed for a prophetic equality of men and warnen, and it is possible that they were attracted to it forthat reason, or at least not prevented from joining the movement by the idea. The same attraction might have existed formen who converted to Christian groups that espoused a gender-ambiguous cosmology or that advocated the elimination ofgender differences by the eradication of sex and marriage. We should not think that all Christian men were as ardent as the Church fathers in explaining away the implications of a genderless Christianity. But numbers were what counted, and the numbers of men and warnen able and willing to dissociate themselves from the Roman cultural traditions of the hierarchy of men over women were fewer than those unable or unwilling to do so, and ultimately insufficient to prevail in the West. I have also argued that behind the manliness that Christian ideology affered was a paradox. It was a manliness that embraced much of what had lang been considered unmanly: refusal to participate in war or to marry and avoidance of secular political office and sexual pleasure. Christian leaders fabricated a variety of metaphors to depict the paradox, some manly, lilce the soldier ofChrist, others unmanly, like the bride ofChrist. In some regard, then, all Christian men identified themselves in a genderambiguous fashion. We can only begin to imagine, for example, what a writer lilce Ambrose thought or feit about his masculine identity as he more than hinted at the erotic pleasure ofbeing a bride ofChrist and then used the image to describe himself. Or when Cyprian praised the soldierlilce bravery and manliness of the martyr while in hiding. It might even be said that the assertion of Christian manliness was a deflective strategy on the part of the Church fathers. It might be argued that they were particularly anxious to defend their own manliness in the face of real uncertainty about it because of the choices they had made about their own lives, refusing to engage in violence or secular politics or to marry. Equally, it might be suggested that they were quick to pointout the un-

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manliness of other men's decisions about their lives for the same reasons. Bven if true, the anxiety of the Church fathers about their manliness only identifies them as men of their time, troubledas so many men were by the changing social realities of their day. (We mi.ght compare, for example, the same uneasiness about living up to Roman manliness that pervaded the depiction of Blagabalus in the Historia Augusta and even the depiction ofJulian by Ammianus Marcellinus.) There are legends that survive, however, that do not avoid but embrace the apprehension about Christian masculinity in late antiquity: the legends of holy transvestites who were men. They are in many ways literary parallels to the many stories of women who become men and mi.ght even have been a literary response to them. Both groups of legends share numerous features, including a practical rather than theological initial justification for the cross-dressing, which is, nevertheless, given a spiritual explanation after the fact, and the frequent association of the change of clothing with the religious transformation of baptism or approaching martyrdom. The stories also share certain elements with classical pagan legends of transvestite male heroes. 121 The legends of holy men-whobecome-women are more than examples of an interesting literary genre or curious transpositions of pagan myth, however; they recall in a pious and didactic fashion the reversal in masculinity that Christianity generally encouraged. They also highlight the simi.larities and differences between Bastern and Western Christianity (and it is noteworthy, in this regard, that while both stories come from Westernsources and attempt to understand the changes to masculinity in an identifiably Roman context, both arealso derived from Bastern sources, apparently, and set in the Bast, the region that Latin writers believed to be the home of the gender-ambiguous traditions ofChristianity and of effeminate practices in general). The first example ofholy male transvestism is that found in the legend of the martyrdom of Sergius and Bacchus. Sergius and Bacchus were said to have been soldiers who served in the Roman army under the Western emperor Maximi.an and were martyred by him in 309. 122 Like the several other military saints, they show themselves to be true soldiers of Christ when they refused to engage in actual warfare. According to their legend, the two men refused to sacrifice to Zeus before a battle. The anonymaus hagiographer recorded the result of their refusal: The emperor's countenance was transformed with anger; immediately he ordered their belts cut off, their tunics and all other military garb removed, the gold torcs taken from araund their necks, and women's clothing placed

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on them; thus they were to be paraded through the middle of the city to the palace .... But when they were led into the middle of the marketplace the saints sang and chanted together ... this apostolic saying: "denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, and putting off the form of the old man, naked in faith we rejoice in you, Lord, because you have clothed us with the garment of salvation, and have covered us with the robe of righteousness; as brides you have decked us with women's gowns.''123

There is a key difference, of course between this legend and those of the holy female transvestites: here the cross-dressing is coerced rather than voluntary. Nonetheless, the men's easy acceptance of their new gender identity and their immediate identification of it with God's designlinks it again to the legends of transvestite warnen. (The name Bacchus for one of the soldiers also links the story to pagan legends of cross-dressing, because more than any other ancient god, Bacchus was associated with transvestism.) The story of Sergius and Bacchus can be linked in several ways to the Christian model of a paradoxical masculinity. U sing the general prejudice against effeminacy, the pagan persecutors attempted to humiliate the men -or at least, this is how the hagiographer described it- by embodying their religious perversity as gendered perversity, emphasizing the irrationality and unnaturalness of both. Through their Christian faith, however, they managed to invert these symbols and interpret the gendered abasement as religious exaltation. Their cross-dressing did not embarrass them but proclaimed their status as brides of Christ. The pastiche ofBiblical phrases they quoted, especially from the book oflsaiah (which in fact ends with the words "like a bride adorned in her jewels"), 124 all focused on the radical nature of Christian transformation. Moreover, they all highlighted the disruption in Christianity of traditional expectations of manliness and unmanliness. In this way, the legend reinforced many of the more general themes of Christian masculinity. The second example of saintly male transvestism comes from Ambrose's hand. Unlike the previous example, for which we do not know either the source of the tale or its author, we have here an account transmitted by one of the central patristic writers who apparently considered it edifying enough to repeat. Ambrose admitted that he was relating the legend from another source but named neither the source nor the story's protagonists. 125 Just as interesting, Ambrose included the story in the tteatise he addressed to his sister and other consecrated virgin warnen (De virginibus); he obviously thought it appropriate enough for them to

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read. It follows his endorsement of the example of Thecla, the best known and earliest of the female transvestite saints, whom Ambrose managed to enlist as a model ofholy virginity without bothering to mention her cross-dressing; perhaps thinking of the one story reminded him of the other. According to Ambrose's version ofthe legend, a virgin ofAntiach during the time of persecutions had refused to marry and was suspected of secret Christian beliefs. Faced with the choice of sacrificing to the pagan gods or being placed in a brothel, she chose the latter, relying on God's protection. ''A great rush of wanton men is made to the place;' Ambrose continued, and the first chosen to enter her room was "a man with the aspect of a terrible warrior?' 126 Ambrose drew upon the violent reality of the soldier here (and the image also anticipates the brutal sexuality also seen in Prudentius's depiction of the gladiator in the martyrdom of Agnes ). But the soldier turned out to be a fellow Christian and suggested to the frightened woman: Let us change our attire, mine will fit you, and yours will fit me, and each for Christ. Your robewill make me a true soldier, minewill make you a virgin. You will be clothed weil. I shall be unclothed even better that the persecutor may recognize me. Take the garment which will conceal the woman, give methat which shall consecrate me a martyr. Put on the cloak which will hide the limbs of a virgin, but preserve her modesty. Take the cap which will cover your hair and conceal your countenance. 127

At this point, Ambrose interrupted his tale. "Let the characters be also considered;' he recommended, "a soldier and a virgin, that is, persans unlike in natural disposition, but alike by the mercy of God.'' 128 The virgin madeher escape, and thinking it was the soldier who had departed, a second man described as "more shameless" entered the room to take his turn. (Perhaps he was "more shameless" because he was seeking to have sex with an actual man, even ifhe thought that the man was a woman; latent in this story is the familiar horror at the sexual penetration of an adult male, as weil as the familiar fascination with the sexual violation of an unwilling virgin, both only narrowly averted.) Ambrose continued: But when he toolc in the state of the matter with his eyes, he said, "What is this? A maiden entered, now a man is tobe seen here.... I had heard but believed not that Christ changed water into wine; now He has begun also to change the sexes. Let us also depart hence while we still are what we were .... I came to a house ofill fame, and see a pledge ofhonor. And yet I go forth changed, for I shall go out chaste who came in unchaste." 129

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There is almost a burlesque quality to the legend. Eventually both the soldier and the virgin were executed and both achieved the elevated status of martyrs. Nothing could pointout more clearly the eventual triumph that Christianity promised for those who accepted its paradoxes, including its paradox of gender identity (and there is even perhaps an intended irony of genres, bawdy tale as hagiography, to reinforce the strength of the paradox). It seeins clear that the focus ofAmbrose's storywas the woman and the embodied manliness ofher spiritual virtue. But the willingness of the soldier to be feminized for virtue's salce is surely as interesting, as is Ambrose's willingness to repeat the tale: elsewhere he denounced crossdressing, saying that nature abhorred it. 130 There is an obvious parallel with the themes of the legend of Sergius and Bacchus, although here the man's cross-dressing was voluntary and not coerced. The juxtaposition of usual notions of manliness and unmanliness can be demonstrated by the man's celebration ofhis transvestism, that his wearing of women's clothing will malce him a true soldier, that it will clothe him in Christ, and that it will prepare him for martyrdom. Again, the story is set against other radical transformations: water into wine and disrepute into honor. That Ambrose could celebrate a legend about a man who dressed himself in women's clothing and elsewhere could compare hirnself to a bride, at the sametime as he denounced the cross-dressing of actors and refused to admit clerics with effeminate mannerisms, says much about the Christian ideology on masculinity. Even within a context of reactionary ideals and a desire toreturn to the hierarchical gender roles ofRoman antiquity, Christian ideology provided an opportunity for improvisation and innovation. The stories of the saintly men who wore women's clothing were not intended to blur the boundaries between the sexes but to reinforce the lines ofsexual difference by the ironic juxtaposition of appearance and reality. The men's profession in both stories underscored that irony: soldiers were manly enough that they could afford to be made to wear women's clothing and still be men. In turn, the men's martyrdoms reiterated their manliness even as it returned them both to the spiritual status of soldiers. (The cross-dressing of the virgin in the story uses this juxtaposition a bit differently: her sentencing to a brothelwas intended to dissolve her masculine virtus into feminine wantonness, but her escape in men's clothing rescued that manliness, and her martyrdom confirmed it.) The stories of the Christian male transvestites should remind us that the manliness of Christian faith was not a simple thing. Even while they condemned unmanliness in men, Christian leaders exhorted men to do much that was unmanly. And while they refused to extend to warnen any

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of the social rights that belonged to !lien, they praised holy women as spiritual men. Finally, even while they forbade holywoinen to ::tppeai in public dressedas men, they sanctioned stories ofholymen who dr~sed. 'as warnen. It only remained to find an apt symbol fÖr encapsulating the'. complexities ofChristian masculinity. · .

CB:APTER EIGHT

IIEUNUCHS FOR THE SAKE OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN" Castration and Christian Manliness

In patt 1 of this book, I argued that the presence of eunuchs in the West-

ern Roman Empire in late antiquity functioned as a powerful remirrder of the many changes facing men of the Roman aristocracy, in both public and private life. But the eunuch also served as a potent symbol of the conversion of the empire to Christianity, andin this chapter I will discuss the importance ofthat symbol. Christian writers denounced the castration of men as typical of all that was immoral and effeminate in pagan culture. At the same time, the authority ofJesus' saying that Christians should "malce themselves eunuchs for the salce of the kingdom of Heaven" required a radical rehabilitation of the symbol of the eunuch. Latin writers condemned early Christian experiments with physical self-castration, because of its disturbing gender ambiguity, but encouraged a tamed notion of spiritual castration. By the end of the fourth century, Latin Christian writers even represented the new ideal of masculinity, the monk, as a type of manly eunuch. As a result, the eunuch served as a symbolnot only of the dangers of traditional Roman masculinity but also of its Christian transformation. THE CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO PAGAN CASTRATION

Christian writers resolutely opposed the popular use of eunuchs in late antiquity. Jerome ridiculed the overly refined Christian women ofhis day who were carried in litters by eunuchs because they "could not bear the unevenness of the streets.'' 1 One noblewoman even brought her eunuchs with her into St. Peter's Basilica, he noted with disgust. 2 Christian writ245

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ers also seem to have shared the same n~gative stereotypes about the char~ acters of eunuchs that other Romans did. When .a eunui:h official of the emperor Valentinian li threatened the life ofAmbrose during the .fa:mous dispute over the control of a basilica at Milan, Ambrose repüed acerbly:·. «then I will suffer as bishops do, you will act as eunuchs do?' 3 If a Christ-' ian noblewoman rejected an association with eunuchs, th.e Church fa~ thers counted it as a sign of her holiness. Jerome praised his dear friend Paulafor rejecting her former habit ofbeing carried on a litter by eunuchs and traveling instead astride a donlcey, and mentioned it in letters to other female acquaintances, doubdess as an example to them. 4 «Their separationfrommen was so complete;' he wrote ofPaula and her ascetic female associates, «that it separated them even from eunuchs, so as to give no occasion to evil tongues, who are accustomed to tearing down the saints in order to reassure the delinquent.'' 5 Similarly, Jerome praised Christian virgins who refused to bathe with eunuchs. 6 Behind these comments was the widespread fear that eunuchs were no guarantors of women's sexual purity. Accordingly, Jerome counseled a female correspondent to choose her eunuch servants on the basis of their good morals, not their good looks. 7 Itwas not the presence ofeunuchs in family life or even in public office that most, horrified Christian writers, however. Even more disturbing was their presence in Roman religion, as the eunuch priests of the Mother of the Gods (Mater Deum ). The mythology of the worship of the Mother of the Gods is complicated, as complicated as most ancient myths, and several scholars have attempted to untangle the threads of the origins and regional variations ofthe cults associated with the Mother ofthe Gods. 8 Suffice it here to say that at the heart of the religion was a goddess, usually lcnown as Cybele from the Phrygian version of the cult, but in the syncretic environment oflate antiquity also identified with Egyptian Isis, Syrian Astarte and Babylonian Ishtar, Carthaginian Tannit (also lcnown in Roman times as Caelestis ), and a host of Greelc goddesses induding Rhea, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Hera, and thus also with Roman Ceres, Venus, and Juno. The Mother of the Gods was believed to control both agricultural and human fertility; she was also responsible for the erotic passions that madehuman fertility possible, and her abundant fecundity had even aided in the multiplication of the gods (thus her tide as «Mother of the Gods"). Also associated with the Mother of the Gods, at least by the dassical era, was her male consort. Again, he was usually lcnown as Atcis from the Phrygian myth, but also identified in late antiquity as Egyptian Osiris, Syrian Tammuz and Babylonian Dumuzi, or Greelc Adonis, and also as Greelc Dionysus and Roman Bacchus. We should not thinlc of

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all of these pairs of gods and goddesses as the same cult, to ·be sure, but Romanwriters oflate antiquity did tend to consider them as ethnic and . local Variations on a general mythological theme. 9 · Variants ~f these cults existed in the western Mediterranean from ear-· liestantiquity. Already in the sixth century B.C.E., Phoenician settlers at . Garthage had imported ~lements of the cult of a great goddess from the eastern coast of the Mediterranem to N orth Mrica, and when Romans _settled in the regi~n, they added Roman elements to it. The cult of the Great Mother (MagnaMater) was brought from Asia Minor to Rome in 204 B.C.E., although it does not seem to have thrived. But the cult seems to have grown in popularity especially in late antiquity. Worship of the Great Mother, by then more often referred to as the Mother of the Gods, was reintroduced in the second century C.E. and spread throughout the western provinces of the empire with Roman imperial patronage. The emperor Elagabalus was also said to have encouraged the cult in the third century, as did Julian in the fourth century. It only disappeared at the beginning of the fifth century C.E. with the general decline of public paganism. 10 The mythological motifs associated with the Mother of the Gods and her consort are equally complicated, but numerous ancient writers attest to an overall pattern. A fundamental component was the theme of castration. According to some versions of the myth, the consort eventually rejected the love of the Mother of the Gods and loved another, andin anger she castrated him (according to other versions, he castrated hirnself out of regret). It is usually said that he died of his wound, but because of her love for him she restored him to life, although he remained a eunuch. Again, complex layers of different, ancient legends were overlaid one upon the other. (According to the Egyptian myth, for example, Osiris was killed by an evil third party, Seth, who dismembered his body as weil as castrated him and then hid the parts of his corpse; when Isis determined to restore him to life by reassembling his body parts, she was unable to locate his genitals.) The myth of the Mother of the Gods and her consort was reenacted each springwith rites of death andlamentation followed by rites of restoration to life and rejoicing. The timing of the rites also coincided with the springtime fertility of the Earth. The mythological theme of castration was also used to explain the presence of eunuch priests who figured prominently in the ritual worship of this network of cults. During the annual spring rites, a few inspired acolytes (or perhaps only a few selected ones) castrated themselves in public, after which they became special priests of the goddess. These eunuch priests were calledgalli in Latin, although no one seemed to know

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why. Some said that it was because of the presence of Celts, also called Galli in Latin, in Asia Minor, where tlie Attis ciii.t originated; Others said itwas after the river Gallos, also inAsiaMinor; the name did allow for:a. . .fmn with "roosters;' also galli in Latin, especially a comparison berween • the crowing of roosters and the high-pitched voices of eunuchs: 11 The · presence of eunuch priests was until recently often disrega.I'cled or at leasf underemphasized by modern scholars of the ciii.ts, some of whom claimed that the practice had died out by the later empire-arguing, for the most part, that the Roman laws against castration were responsible for this decline. The self-castration of devotees of the Mother of the Gods might have been only a minority experience, but it continued to exist throughout the later history of her cult and demonstrates how Roman law could sometimes be ignored with impunity. It is true that the Castration honored in the myth and reenacted by followers was spiritualized in meaning by some pagan intellectuals, among them the emperor Julian, who saw the myth of castration as a symbol of the need to cut oneself off from material and carnal realities in order to approach higher things. 12 But the notion of spiritual self-castration could easily have coexisted with actual physical self-castration. Various explanations have been given for the relationship of castration to the worship of the Mother of the Gods. The priests' self-castration was seen even'in antiquity as a symbolic sacrifice of individual fertility in arder to enhance the fertility of the community and even of the cosmos, and as a sacred reenactment of the spring harvest. The gallus-to-be took a sickle or sharpened stone, perhaps an agriciii.tural symbol, and in an ecstatic frenzy severed his genitals on the Day of Blood (Dies sanguinis) March 24). 13 The agricultural connection perhaps also explains the felling of a pine ttee that occurred during the annual rituals. Lilcewise, both ancient and modern scholars have seen the priests' self-castration as a pledge of their sexual purity. 14 The priests' self-castration may also have been part of a renunciation of masculine identity, however, and associated with their personal dedication to a feminine deity. After their castration the new eunuchs adopted women's clothing, or at least clothing identified as women's, even if it had originated in ritual costume, including wearing a veil and jewelry and growing their hair long. According to one source, the newly self-made eunuch ran through the streets with his severed genitals in his hand, and threw them at a doorstep; the warnenofthat hausehold were obliged to give him some of their clothing, which he adopted as his own. 15 We must allow for inaccurate descriptions as well as regional variations in the rituals of the religion, but this briefoverview is necessary in order to understand the Christian reaction to the worship of the

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Mother of the Gods, since Christian writers tended to lump all of these . rituals and cults tagether ·as one. To begin, it must be. said that Christian writers were ob:viously famil. :i_ar with the dei:ails of.the myth. They rnight have witnessed the public • self-castration ofthe priests or public reenactments of the Attis legend in t±i.eatrical pertormances,sometimes includi.b.g the actual castration of a prisoner sentenced to parcicipate in the show (and an example of the rea. sons for their denunciation of the spectacles ). 16 "The Mother of the Gods loved a beautiful young man:' Lactantius explained, "and having caught himwith a rnistress she turned him into a half-man [semivir] by cutring off his genitals [virilia]; and therefore his sacred rites are now celebrated by eunuch priests fgalli sacerdotes]?'17 A century earlier, Tertullian had asked: "Why is a male mutilated in honor of the Idaean goddess, unless it be that the youth who was too disdainful ofher advances was castrated., owing to her vexation at his daring to crossher love?" 18 In the fifth century, Prudentius ask:ed the same question: "Why does the Berecynthian priest mutilate and destroy his loins?" 19 In these descriptions, the Christian writers gave no indication that these priests had ce-:u;ed to castrate themselves. Without exception, Christian writers used the castrationritual to confirm the depravity of pagan religion. Lactantius, who wrote at length against the sacrilege of paganism generally, described the public rituals in honor oftheMother of the Gods as "insanity" and made it clear that what revolted him was the violation of men's bodies through castration. "Men themselves mak:e propitiation with their own sex organs," he suggested, and ''with such mutilation they malce themselves neither men nor women?'20 Tertullian also moclced the gender ambiguity of the eunuch priests in his polernical writings against the pagans; they were "a third sex, and made up as it is of male and female in one?'21 Augustine ridiculed the "amputation of virility" in the cult of the Mother of the Gods, in his attaclc on the pagan gods in The City ofGod) in which "the sufferer was neither changed into a woman nor allowed to remain a man.'m The familiar rhetoric against the blurring of sexual boundaries was called into action to denounce the self-castration of the eunuch priests. Perhaps the most interesting denunciation of self-castration by a Christian writer was that of Prudentius in his Liber peristephanon on the Christian martyrs. Prudentius saw the Castration of the eunuch priests as proof of the violence of paganism. He imagined a conversation between the soon-to-be martyr Romanus and the pagan emperor Galerius, and had Romanus ask: "Shall I go to Cybele's pine-grove? No, for there stands in my way the lad who emasculated himselfbecause ofher lust, and

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by a grievous wound cutring the parts of shame saved hirnself from the unehaste goddess' embrace, a eunuch for whom the Mother has to lament in many a rite?'23 Hidden in this passage is an ambivalent praise of the action, since by castrating himself, Attis has preserved himself.from the goddess' '