Leland D. Peterson
Ed. Note: This article contains sexually graphic content, which is unavoidable given the topic. This article may make you throw up, in which case YOU SHOULD NOT READ IT. If you do read it, don't send us any letter of complaint. You've been forewarned.
In an essay for the popular newsweekly Time magazine (July 26, 2004), Andrew Sullivan, an out-of-the-closet homosexual and self-proclaimed conservative, boldly attempts to refute the gloomy predictions of those such as James Dobson who see "a presaging [of] the fall of Western civilization" if marriage eventually includes the same-sex union of "gays" and lesbians. Sullivan argues that homosexual marriage is not merely licensed sodomy, but is really a "conservative measure," for recently married homosexuals in Massachusetts must now live up to the traditional standards in marriage of "fidelity, responsibility and commitment." Instead of destroying heterosexual marriage, homosexuals are really strengthening it, argues Sullivan, and those such as President Bush who politicize the issue by "turning a tiny minority into a lethal threat to civilization" serve to divide, not unite, American civilization.
Sullivan, a Catholic not much impressed by his Church's negative view of same-sex "marriage," holds advanced Ivy League degrees in the humane studies, but never seems to be concerned with precedents in the ancient world that would test his abstract notions of felicity in the future of "gay marriages." If he would choose to investigate, he could find out easily that "gay marriage" was a key element in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Something very much like the AIDS epidemic that has been the scourge of such "gay" meccas as San Francisco, and is now a worldwide epidemic, can be identified in the second century A.D.
Same-sex "marriage" was the invention of the Emperor Nero in the first-century A.D. In a comparatively long reign among the first-century Caesars (A.D. 54-68), he began as a talented and generous though youthful friend of the people, but degenerated in a mere 14 years to become the prototype of Lord Acton's axiom: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Paranoid in his last years, Nero lived in constant fear of assassination as he in turn ordered the assassinations of members of the Senate and nobility, or sent orders to others to commit suicide. Suetonius, a second-century Roman historian, began "to list his follies and crimes," which included at least three same-sex "marriages." Nero's first same-sex "marriage" was preceded by a transgendering operation on his intended bride that was thought to be successful:Having trued to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, he went through a wedding ceremony with him -- dowry, bridal veil and all -- which the whole Court attended; then brought him home, and treated him as a wife. He dressed Sporus in the fine clothes normally worn by an Empress and took him in his own litter not only to every Greek assize and fair, but actually through the Street of Images at Rome, kissing him amorously now and then.Sullivan's assumption that "gay marriage" would require its partners "to live up to the standards of fidelity, responsibility and commitment never before asked of them" is certainly not true in the case of Nero. His infatuation with Sporus did not prevent him from pursuing an incestuous love with his mother, Agrippina; when Court politics moved to block him, he engaged a mistress who looked like his mother, but visual evidence suggested to the onlookers that he and Agrippina had intercourse "every time they rode in the same litter -- the state of his clothes when he emerged proved it." Not even his mother was able to satisfy his passion for long; shortly after his "marriage" to Sporus, he "married" a freedman, Doryphyrus, but this time Nero played the bride, "and on the wedding night he imitated the screams and moans of a girl being deflowered." In time, Nero arranged the murders of his mother and his aunt, Domitia Lepida.
Long before his nuptials with Sporus and Doryphyrus, Nero had married his adoptive sister, Octavia, whom he divorced and later had executed as an adulteress. He then married Poppaea Sabina (who already had a husband) 12 days after his divorce from Octavia. Pregnant and not feeling well, she had the effrontery to complain when he came home late from the races, which prompted an early instance of wife abuse "when he kicked her to death." His second wife after Octavia, Statilia Messalina, was also previously married, and Nero "was obliged to murder her husband, a consul."
Nero, then, was not merely incestuous and bisexual, but omni-sexual, as a reading of Suetonius will document. Exploiting fully the unlimited possibilities for pleasure available to an absolute emperor, he apparently arranged a third same-sex "marriage," though there is no mention that he had ever divorced either Sporus or Doryphyrus. According to Tacitus, A Roman historian and public official, Nero was again the bride:
Nero was already corrupted by every lust, natural and unnatural. But he now refuted any surmises that no further degradation was possible for him. For a few days later he went through a formal wedding ceremony with one of the perverted gang called Pythagoras. The emperor, in the presence of witnesses, put on the bridal veil. Dowry, marriage bed, wedding torches, all were there. Indeed everything was public which even in a natural union is veiled by night.That we have three distinctly different names for Nero's one male wife and two male husbands argues that three individuals were involved, and that tradition was not merely confusing the name of the one individual. Detailed references to these marriages are discussed by Craig Williams (see bibliography).
That Nero's well-publicized male/male "marriages" influenced succeeding generations of Romans is confirmed in the satires of Martial and Juvenal written some four and five decades after Nero's death. As Williams has noted, "Still, as a rule Martial and Juvenal appropriate actual practices in their satiric commentary on Roman society, and it seems that weddings between males, though certainly not officially sanctioned, were a feature of the social landscape." But was not the practice of an emperor an "official sanction"? I find no references in the century following Nero that any emperor threatened with penalties or criminalized those participating in male/male "weddings." In the early third century A.D., the emperor Elagabulus followed Nero's precedent of becoming "a bride to a male partner." Not until the fourth century A.D., when Christianity was becoming the religion of the empire, were legal penalties enacted prohibiting male/male "marriages." It is reasonable to conclude that male/male "weddings" were a part of Roman culture for approximately 250 years after the death of Nero (A.D. 68), a practice that could have been causative for the Empperor Constantine in moving the seat of government from Rome to Byzantium in A.D. 315.Martial, a satirist who came to Rome in his early 20s during the last year of Nero's life and reign, lived there for 35 years. His first book of Epigrms was published around A.D. 85, after he had observed Roman life for some 20 years. As chronicled in his "indecent" Epigrams (about one quarter of the 1,171 entries in 12 books pertain to this subject), seemingly every form of homosexuality practiced by Nero became a part of Roman sexual mores. The reader interested in exhaustive detail of Roman homosexuality must take up Williams's study, which, in the "Index of Passages Cited," gives precedence to Martial with 169 citations, comparted to 59 for Juvenal and 42 for Horace. Juvenal was old-fashioned, a satiric critic of sexual corruption, but Martial was obviously a participant, very much a part of the "in" crowd for whom there was obviously nothing approximating the sexual moral code that had governed Rome in its earlier days.
Martial is not conscious of the possibility of any sort of romantic love between man and woman. He reveals why there may have been serious differences between him and his wife: "Catching me with a boy, wife, you upbraid me harshly...." Later, he invites his wife to leave the house or "conform to [his] ways." Finally, the last straw: "you won't let me sodomize" you, unlike other famous women and their husbands.
As his sexual interest in his wife apparently waned, Martial's interest in prepubescent and adolescent slave boys grew proportionately. Whereas Juvenal never exploits the homosexual practices he satirizes, Martial makes clear his affinities with upper-class Romans who always had at hand their sex slaves. For his friend Flaccus, he details the physical qualities he would prefer in his boy slave, not dissimilar to the sentimental lyrics we find in early 20th-century American popular music idealizing feminine beauty, including the fairest complexion, eyes like the stars, flowing soft tresses (no curly hair), classic forehead and nose, and rosy red lips formed for kissing. Going beyond the reticence of American pop music, he would like the boy to be temptingly resistive but ultimately submissive.
Goaded by his lust and intenting to buy a slave boy for his pleasure, Martial is outbid by Phoebus, who has cash to match his lust. Straining to the utmost to find comparisons, Martial sentimentally imagines the sweetness of an apple bitten by a young girl, the Corycian saffron, fresh grapes in a vineyard, the myrtle eastern incense, the turf with summer rain, all of which is like the perfumed kisses of Diadumenus given too sparingly. In a pornographic epigram he imagines himself approaching the climactic moment but frustrated when the boy tells him to speed it up. In all, as the topic index in the third volume of the new Loeb Classical Library edition indicates, there are some 35 epigrams celebrating kissing, amorous by-play, and anal intercourse with prepubescent or adolescent slave boys, similar in all respects to the 21st-century sex scandal in the American Catholic Church, except that the violated boys in America were often able to receive through secular courts handsome rewards in financial compensation for pain and misery they endured. Martial and his adult male friends assumed that non-complaining slave boys enjoyed this intercourse as much as they did.
Commenting on the sexual proclivities of his contemporaries, Martial has fun with homosexuals such as Cotta, who invites for dinner well-endowed males he has observed at the bath. A fellow with "rough hair," not in the least effeminate and a true follower of Nero, had become a male bride the day before. Like Nero and Agrippinia, Amminanus is incestuously involved with his mother. The pedophilia celebrated in the Satyricon of Nero's day was obviously a precedent for Martial.
As Williams argues, there was a caste system among Roman homosexuals, the upper class being those who penetrated anally, but were never themselves penetrated. They scorned the lower classes who provided the rectums they loved to penetrate, including the untouchables, or cinaedi -- effeminate men who offered the anus to anyone with a denarius, or performed fellatio. Female prostitutes were expected to be ready for either vaginal or, preferably, anal intercourse, as Martial wanted of his wife. The reader may consult the topic index of the new translation of the Loeb Classical Library for further examples of Roman sex life in Martial's day.
If Martial mirrors the mores of upper-class Rome, it is evident that homosexuality set the tone for all classes. Juvenal may hearken back to the primitive mores of Republican Rome and criticize contemporaries for degeneracy, but Martial is the poet celebrating the Neroian aftermath. The Roman family of the Republic for the purpose of raising children is not seriously considered, certainly not esteemed or celebrated, exactly like some predict will be the aftermath of same-sex "marriage" in the contemporary U.S., "because children and motherhood [are] no longer ... the centerpiece of marriage" (Peter Sprigg; see bibliography). Inevitably, the sterility of homosexuality would encourage a population decline not immediately evident. As Juvenal noted, a sexual disease associated with anal intercourse could in time have disastrous consequences. Martial tells of a man dying from a "wasting disease" that chokes him and blackens his face, which could be AIDS, but not indisputably.
As I noted in an earlier NOR article (Jan. 2004), if the venereal disase identified by Juvenal among Romans of his day was AIDS, its spread was very likely "rapid and lethal throughout the Roman Empire," as it has spread throghout the world in our own day. A possible record of this epidemic may have been in the Antonine Plague of D.D. 161, which, according to one source, killed a fourth of the Roman population and one was one of the "first signs of the decline of the Roman Empire." As the symptoms of this plague are never precisely identified, I am assuming that a coincident AIDS epidemic contributed to the disaster. This plague, not quite a century after the death of Nero, was apparently the beginning of a long-term depopulation of Rome, which, at its height was a city with a population variously estimated at 500,000 to a million people, with 750,000 a good compromise figure. By the Middle Ages, about 20,000 to 30,000 remained in Rome, a loss of about 97 percent in six or seven centuries.
The Antonine Plague of second-century Rome is different from the Black Death of 1348 and the Great Plague of 1665. For one thing, the Antonine Plague seems more prolonged than the other two, which had devastated London and England for two or three years before subsiding and eventually disappearing. Second, the Antonine Plague seems to have permanently depressed Roman population growth, which was certainly not the case in England in the 15th and 18th centuries. Third, the Roman army was decimated in the Antonine Plague, while England had no standing army posted throughout an Empire in those centuries. Ultimately, the Roman army made up for its shortages by recruiting barbarians who had little background for traditional Roman discipline. In short, after the Antonine Plague, the traditional Roman family was in disarray and Roman decline followed the declining population. Nero's bequest to Roman posterity may rightly claim most, but not all, of the credit for the continuing decay of the ties that bound Roman society.
Same-sex "marriage" by itself did not bring about Roman decadence. But it signaled unmistakably the triumphant emergence of a society dominated by a homosexuality
dedicated to insatiable sensual experiences without the responsibilities of producing and raising children.Andrew Sullivan, who is HIV-positive, wrote in his book Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality
that "gay marriages" serve as a model for heterosexual marriages: "There is more likely to be a greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman." These extramarital outlets, he claims, make "gay marriages" more likely to survive than heterosexual marriages. It sounds like Sullivan is advocating the ways of ancient Rome. The U.S. in the 21st century -- with legalized abortion, readily available contraception, a consistently high rate of divorce, rampant adultery, and teenage fornication resulting in high rates of sexually transmitted diseases -- has only to elect as its president a bachelor with same-sex partners who will have a wedding ceremony in the White House in which he wears the veil, and then to await its plagues, barbarian invasions, and epidemics to hasten its decline and fall. I predict the electin of a president fulfilling those qualifications in A.D. 2068, two millenia after the death of Nero.- Andrew Sullivan, "If at First You Don't Succeed ...," Time, July 26, 2004.
- Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality
- Suetonius, "Nero," in The Twelve Caesars
- Tacitus, "Nero and His Helpers," in The Annals of Imperial Rome
- Martial, Epigrams
Martial Epigrams, vol. 1, "Introduction," ed. and trans. Walter C.A. Ker, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard Univ. Press, 1919.
- Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.
- "Rome," in Enc. Britannica, 1929 ed., 1952 rpt., vol. 19, pp. 472-83, 5050-07.
- R.J. and M.L. Littman, "Galen and the Antonine Plague," The American Journal of Philology, 94, no. 3 (1973), pp. 243-255.
- J.F. Gillam, "The Plague Under Marcus Aurelius," The American Journal of Philology, 82, no. 3 (1961), pp. 225-251.
- Leland D. Peterson, "Homosexuality & Same-Sex 'Marriage,'" New Oxford Review, vol LXXI, no. 1 (Jan. 2004), pp. 34-36.
- Peter Sprigg, Outrage
Related links:
- "Introducing Saint Gay" (Warning! This is not for the faint of heart, or liberals or Cafeteria Catholics! You have been advised.)
- "Juvenal vs. the queer guys" (Musings of a Pertinacious Papist, August 10, 2004)
- Michael Rose, "Cincinnati's West-Side Story: Wrestler Priests and Lapdog Editors" (New Oxford Review)
- Homosexuality (traditional Christian & Catholic links)
No comments:
Post a Comment