Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome

425 Pages·2021·5.639 MB·English

by  Sandra Boehringer

FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN
ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME
This groundbreaking study, among the earliest syntheses on female homo­
sexuality throughout Antiquity, explores the topic with careful reference to an­
cient concepts and views, drawing fully on the existing visual and written record
including literary, philosophical, and scientific documents.
Even today, ancient female homosexuals are still too often seen in terms of
a mythical, ethereal Sapphic love, or stereotyped as “Amazons” or courtesans.
Boehringer’s scholarly book replaces these clichés with rigorous, precise anal­
ysis of iconography and texts by Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Juvenal, and many other
lyric poets, satirists, and astrological writers, in search of the prevailing norms,
constraints, and possibilities for erotic desire. The portrait emerges of an ancient
society to which today’s sexual categories do not apply—a society “before
sexuality”—where female homosexuality looks very different, but is nonetheless
very real.
Now available in English for the first time, Female Homosexuality in Ancient
Greece and Rome includes a preface by David Halperin. This book will be of value
to students and scholars of ancient sexuality and gender, and to anyone interested
in histories and theories of sexuality.
Sandra Boehringer is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University
of Strasbourg, France. She is the author of numerous articles on issues of gender
and sexuality in the ancient world and the French translator of John Winkler
and Maud Gleason. She has also co­edited several collective volumes, including
Foucault, la sexualité, l’Antiquité, soon to be available in English from Routledge.

FEMALE
HOMOSEXUALITY
IN ANCIENT GREECE
AND ROME
Sandra Boehringer
Translated from the French by Anna Preger
This edition published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Originally published as L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et
romaine © 2007, Société d’édition Les Belles Lettres
English translation © 2021, Routledge
Preface © 2007, David Halperin
Preface to the English translation © 2021, Sandra Boehringer
Translator’s note © 2021, Anna Preger
The right of Sandra Boehringer to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book.
ISBN: 978­0­367­74478­6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978­0­367­74476­2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978­1­003­15808­0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
To Laurie Laufer

Contents
List of figures xi
Translator’s note xiii
Preface to the English translation (2020):
Female Homosexuality, a History in the Present Tense xv
David Halperin, Preface to Sandra Boehringer, L’Homosexualité
féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 2007) xxxiii
Acknowledgments (2007) xli
List of abbreviations xliii
Introduction:
toward a constructionist exploration of ancient sexuality 1
1 Myth and Archaic lyric poetry:
homoeroticism in the feminine 20
Fragments of a lover’s discourse 21
An institutionalization of homosexuality? 21
Men 21
Women 23
Love in song 27
Modern fictions 27
The erôs of melic poetry 29
Alcman’s Partheneia 30
Sappho’s poems 38
Anacreon and playful eroticism 43
Anacreon’s young Lesbian 45
Brief excursus on a false cognate: λεσβιάζειν 46
Multiple erotic possibilities 48
viii Contents
A picture of love 51
Special discursive categories 54
A mythical trace: the goddess and the young girl 55
The myth of Kallisto: a female affair 56
Textual and iconographic sources 57
A mythical core 59
A singular variant: the embrace between Artemis and Kallisto 62
A comedy by Amphis 63
A mythical episode 66
An erotic metamorphosis 69
Kallisto bathing 71
2 Classical and Hellenistic Greece:
from silence to humor 75
Plato’s Symposium: a theoretical category 75
Aristophanes’ speech: erôs and sexuality 77
Aristophanes’ speech in context 79
Erôs in Aristophanes: beyond the sexual 82
Erotic categories in human nature 87
After the split but before the relocation of organs 88
After the relocation of organs 89
The effects of sexual union 89
Types of erotic behavior and types of human beings 90
A single erôs 91
Erotic relations between women 94
The halves descended from the all-female being 94
Plato and the category of women descended from the all-female being 100
Plato’s Laws: prohibition as recognition 104
Women’s place in the Magnesian city 106
The prohibition of homosexuality 110
The dangers of intemperance? 111
The dangers of passions? 112
The techniques of persuasion 114
The lawgiver’s obsession with demography 116
Sex between women in the Laws 118
To prohibit is to state 120
Taking all scenarios into account 123
Representations and silences in the Classical period 125
What the images show and what they do not show 126
A brief overview of iconographic sexual taboos 126
Women, men, and olisboi 128
Women among themselves: some disputed interpretations 132
Bathing scenes 132
Courtesans among themselves? 136
Women with garlands 137
What the texts say and what they do not say 139
The silence of comedy 140
What philosophy says, and what it does not say 143
Contents ix
Aristotle’s silence, and what he says about doves 144
Texts as indirect documents on attitudes 150
Play and humor in the Hellenistic period 156
Asclepiades the poet-character and his loves 156
Epigram V. 207 and the poetic œuvre of Asclepiades 156
Asclepiades’ hetairai 160
Elegiac fiction 162
Portrait of Ego, a smitten lover 164
Two Samian women 167
From the poet’s gaze to collective attitudes 171
Neither monsters nor prostitutes 171
Neither tribades nor viragos 175
Norms and their limits 176
Changes in discourse (from the third to the first century bce) 178
Artemis and Kallisto: a comic adaptation by Amphis 178
Meleager’s Garland: a different kind of humor 182
3 The Roman period:
from mythical fiction to satire 187
Poetic discourse: Ovid and mythical transformation 190
Sappho in the Heroides: the birth of a myth 190
The Sapphic paradox: reconstructions of Sappho after the Archaic period 190
Sappho’s letter: poetic metamorphosis and the metamorphosis of love 194
Writing desire: from Sappho to Ovid 195
Ovid and Sapphic love 198
Callisto in the Metamorphoses: the hypercharacterization of a myth 203
The sex of virgins 204
Sexual fluidity 207
A fleeting embrace between women, and the metamorphoses of desire 208
Iphis in the Metamorphoses: the metamorphosis of the myth 212
From Leukippos to Iphis 213
The structure of the narrative 215
Characters and roles 218
The role of the gods 220
Textual reminiscences and mythical echoes 222
The metamorphosis of a metamorphosis 224
A girl 224
Two girls 227
Two girls and a goddess 229
A new kind of love 231
A metamorphosis, but not of Iphis 235
A Roman impossibility: the etiology of a disappearance 237
The dénouement: “and they lived happily ever after” 238
The reasons for the impossibility 239
A unique category 241
Sexual satire 243
The emergence of the tribade 243
The origins of tribades, in Phaedrus’ Fables 243