How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (39 page)

For this discussion, Boswell depends primarily on Petronius's
Satyricon
. Citing Circe's attempted seduction of Encolpius at
Satyricon
127 (“You've clearly got a ‘brother'—I wasn't too bashful to ask, you see—so what's to stop you from ‘adopting' a ‘sister' as well?”), he asserts on the basis of this that
frater
is “manifestly…a technical term for long-standing homosexual partner” in Roman culture (67). This passage, he says, “implies” that
frater
was “widely understood in the Roman world to denote a permanent partner in a homosexual relationship.” Although the author of
Same-Sex Unions
goes out of his way to admire Petronius's “sharp ear for quotidian speech,” he neglects to indicate how precarious it might be to base far-ranging claims about popular Roman mores and argot on a single line from a work whose author (Nero's
arbiter elegantiarum
, for Heaven's sake) belonged to the rarified Roman
beau monde
.

The nonliterary evidence for Boswell's claim that the words
brother
and
sister
were “common terms of endearment for heterosexual spouses in ancient Mediterranean societies” turns out to be equally problematic. To support his point about the eroticization of sibling terminology in Roman poetry, Boswell cites papyri from Hellenistic Egypt. But the very ancient cultural traditions of brother-sister incest make the use of Egyptian material problematic, to say the least, especially as the basis for sweeping statements about the “ancient Mediterranean.” Indeed, when the author cites the historian Keith Hopkins on the prevalence of
sister
as a term of endearment used by Egyptian husbands of their wives, he fails to mention that the thrust of Hopkins's article is that there was in fact real sibling incest going on in Roman Egypt, perhaps because this information might weaken the force of Boswell's own linguistic interpretations, which forever shun the literal in favor of the figurative. This is not to say that Hopkins is necessarily right (or wrong); the debate about sibling incest in Greco-Roman Egypt is an ongoing and fierce one. But it's a typical omission on Boswell's part. (Indeed, he often allows bibliographical trees to obscure the argumentative forest. For example, he cites snippets of Susan Treggiari's thoroughgoing study of Roman marriage, but you'd never guess from them that her overarching conclusion is that mutual affect and the procreation of offspring were vital elements of that institution, which Boswell insists on portraying as a mere “property arrangement.”)

Ah well. Why quibble over secondary sources like Hopkins and Treggiari when you can support your claims about Latin usage in the first century
A.D
. with a footnote about the Old Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, composed two thousand years earlier? This Boswell does—just one example of the astonishing methodological free association that continually mars this book. In this scholar's approach to world literature, pretty much everything turns out to be about same-sex unions, and he's hardly shy about sharing that insight with you. For Boswell, the phrase
ambo fratres
(“both brothers”), as used by the theologian Tertullian at the end of the second century
A.D
., is “strongly reminiscent” of the phrase
fortunati ambo
(“fortunate pair!”), used by the pagan Vergil to describe the lovers Nisus and Euryalus in Book 9 of the
Aeneid
, written two hundred years earlier, because each contain the Latin word
ambo
, “both.” This is the kind of thing that gives pedantry a bad name;
you may as well say that Tertullian's
fratres
are the literary antecedents of the eponymous sibling in the American pop tune “He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother,” simply because both are about brothers. But then, why bother, when Boswell himself goes on to suggest as much? This isn't scholarship, it's Rorschach. Blotches like that one turn up on too many of
Same-Sex Unions
's pages.

As you sputter through Boswell's attempts to demonstrate that
frater
was essentially interchangeable with
amator
for the early Christian clerics who first concocted the same-sex unions, you can't help thinking that, even if he's right about all the
frater
stuff, it's still a pretty oblique line of argument. The oldest manuscripts in which the
adelphopoiêsis
is transmitted were written in Greek by Greek speakers; the later Latin and Old Church Slavonic versions are merely translations. (Boswell is right to omit them from his appendices here.) I suppose that Boswell's inclusion of the
frater
stuff is meant to establish a context of pervasive brother/lover confusion throughout the ancient Mediterranean, but what he really needs is incontrovertible evidence for extensive and commonplace use of the Greek word
adelphos
to mean “lover”—and in everyday, rather than highly specialized, contexts. Come to think of it, even that may not be enough. The assumption that allows Boswell's conclusion to be properly drawn is that the word
adelphos
would have
superseded
any other word for “lover” in the minds of the Greek speakers who first wrote down the
adelphopoiêsis
ceremony. But Boswell can't, in fact, reliably demonstrate this, and so all of the carefully rigged dissertations about the erotic, figurative potential of
frater
and
soror
turn out to be window dressing.

Here again, it's worth noting that Boswell suppresses a pesky bit of information by sticking it in a thicket of thorny notes. There, he observes that postclassical Greek
adelphos
lacked a clearly erotic sense, which in fact had to be supplied by the transliterated Latin
frater
(in a special poetic sense, as his example from the
Greek Anthology
indicates). If it is “inescapably” clear that
adelphos
would have been widely understood as meaning “lover” to those who invented and later transcribed the
adelphopoiêsis
ceremony (as Boswell goes on to claim), then why the need to borrow from Latin?

This contortion of the Greek and Latin tongues turns out to be only the first storey, as it were, of a wobbly argumentative structure. Here is its blueprint:

Note again the slippery rhetorical slope: the denigration of any nonerotic sense of
adelphos
to a “literalness” that the author has taken considerable pains to show is insufficient; the tendentious aside about the “inescapable” truth of what are, in fact, merely his own premises; the logically flawed progress by which a potential connotation becomes, finally, always and absolutely denotative.

 

Boswell's discussion of the language and diction of “same-sex”
eros
is meant to be grounded in a far-reaching demonstration that the social context for the equation Brother=Lover was a venerated tradition of institutionalized homosexual unions in Greek and Roman culture. It is from this cultural source, he argues, that
adelphopoiêsis
flowed—the liturgical celebration of a reciprocal, mutual affect between loving male couples that was first publicly celebrated in pagan antiquity.

In the case of Greece, this argument must necessarily take the form of debunking what has become the prevailing view that male homosexual relationships in Greece were structured according to a clear-cut hierarchical distinction between the attitude of the lover, or
erastês
, and that of his younger beloved, the
erômenos
or, more colloquially,
paidika
. Now it is surely true, as Boswell and others (such as John Winkler and Kenneth De Vries) have argued, that the strict hierarchization of Eros in classical culture, like other Greek social institutions such as the seclusion of women, was likely to have been more “rhetorical” than both ancient accounts and modern interpretations of them often give credit for. But Boswell's own discussion of relevant texts hardly justifies his impatient dismissal of what he calls the “arch, stylized, and misleading view of Greek homosexuality” advanced by many contemporary scholars,
as a “shallow misreading of ‘popular' literature.” Hence, for example, the fact that even the ancients were unsure as to whether Achilles or Patroclus was the
erastês
in that particular relationship does not necessarily support the author's claim that “it is probably wrong to imagine that ‘lover' and ‘beloved' were clearly defined positions or roles.” You could just as well argue that the fact that ancient writers were willing to devote time and energy to pondering this question suggests that such roles were in fact institutionalized—to the extent that who was on top was something worth knowing in the first place.

Boswell tends to support his assertions about Greek cultural institutions with references to important (if often unrepresentative) texts that are, as often as not, given without their proper context. Hence, for example, his liberal and rather sentimental use of the
Symposium
, which according to him provides a clear demonstration that Greek same-sex love was as completely reciprocal as the (alleged) medieval same-sex unions that were (he alleges) its cultural descendants. The proof, he argues, is in the fact that in this work, both
eros
and
philia
, “desire” (erotic) and “friendship” (unerotic), could be used to describe a single relationship:

He then goes on to translate a line of the
Symposium
that refers to Aristogeiton's
eros
and Harmodius's
philia
; and elsewhere reiterates the fact that Plato used within a single sentence both
eros
and
philia
for the same relationship as proof that the two words were synonymous. But his subsequent acknowledgment (relegated to a footnote) that “the phrasing could be taken to suggest that the two men had quite different sorts of feelings for each other”—i.e., Aristogeiton felt
eros
, erotic desire, whereas Harmodius felt
philia
, nonerotic affection—gives little indication of the extent to which the passage he cites here could, in fact, be construed as ideal support for the “arch, stylized, and misleading” view of Greek homosexuality that he elsewhere denigrates. The
Athenian tradition was that Aristogeiton was the
erastês
of Harmodius: so Thucydides, in his account of the tyrannicides' plot (6.54). Aristogeiton's
eros
is thus hardly interchangeable with Harmodius's
philia
in an affective dynamic characterized by a perfect reciprocity of loving friendship, as Boswell would have it. If anything, each of the emotions described in this passage conforms with great precision to the Greek schematization of homosexual affect described by Dover in his edition of the
Symposium
: “The more mature male, motivated by
eros
, pursues, and the younger, if he yields, is motivated by affection, gratitude and admiration” (Dover).

I should add that throughout his discussion of the
Symposium
and other texts, Boswell neglects to consider any potential interpretive ramifications of speaker and context—for example, that there might be a grain of self-interest in the opinions expressed by the
erastês
Pausanias, or by the comic poet Aristophanes, in
Symposium
. Here as elsewhere, he merely cites a given passage as an example of “what Plato thinks,” regardless of speaker or of dramatic, philosophical, or ideological context. Given that Plato's discourse about love retains considerable cultural authority not merely in the West in general but, perhaps more important for many readers of
Same-Sex Unions
, in gay culture particularly, this is careless.

But the selective and ultimately self-interested nature of Boswell's use of classical sources is most apparent in his discussion of what he asserts was a tradition of “formal [homosexual] unions” in ancient Rome. These, he declares, were “publicly recognized relationships entailing some change in status for one or both parties, comparable in this sense to heterosexual marriage”; he goes on to make the claim that such relationships occasionally used “the customs and forms of heterosexual marriage.”

Incredibly, the sole piece of evidence adduced in favor of this outrageous claim consists of a satiric epigram of the first-century
A.D
. satirist Martial, in which the writer describes a male-male “wedding” (12.42). “Such unions,” the author of
Same-Sex Unions
asserts, “were not always private.” That “always” is a good demonstration of a typically Boswellian one-two argumentative punch: the slippery slope followed by begging the question. For “always” slyly alchemizes a single (alleged) instance into a widespread social practice; and in making this highly
tendentious insinuation (that private wedding ceremonies between men in fact
regularly
took place) the premise for an even broader conclusion (i.e., that such unions were in fact often
public
), Boswell is, in effect, assuming what he needs to prove.