sporadically mention her homosexuality. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, she was promoted as a married bisexual woman. The story of her dramatic suicide over a man named Phaon, a ferryman of great beauty, became legendary (Dover, p.174). Her suicide has given some writers a legitimising excuse for foregrounding her heterosexuality and playing down or completely ignoring her homosexuality. Still others have compared her intimate relationships with women with the erastes-eromenos setup in ancient Greece – a point that also shows to what extent women’s sexuality was seen only in relationship to that of men.
There is no visual or verbal evidence recounting exactly what Sappho looked like. Her image on vases appears at least one hundred years after her lifetime and none of these, it has been observed, bear any resemblance to one another (Snyder, p.31). No identifiable statues of Sappho survive. There does exist, however, a red-figure vase dating around 450 BC that supposedly shows Sappho seated between two standing female figures, one of which holds up a lyre, the other, a garland.
In addition to the person of Sappho as a legendary figure whose work acknowledges the presence of female homosexuality in antiquity, there is also mythology. Although Amazons are a myth about women created by men, they do speak to the existence and viability of female sexual independence apart from men in antiquity. The Amazons were a legendary tribe of equestrian women warriors who shunned the company of men and lived, hunted, and went into battle together in an all-female environment. Mythology has it that they were from Asia Minor, near the Black Sea, and that they worshipped Diana, goddess of the hunt. In art, Greek males are often shown fighting against the Amazon who was a useful manifestation of barbarism and the sexual threat of women. In myth, the Amazon subverts the ‘natural’ order by rejecting marriage and maiming or practising infanticide on her male children.
27. Zeus and Ganymede, 470 BC.
Museo Archeologico di Ferrara, Ferrara.
28. The Tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogiton, c. 477 BC.
Marble, h: 195 cm. Copy after a Greek original by Critios.
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.
29. Scene of Kottabos, end of the 5th century BC.
Ceramic. The British Museum, London.
Both the Etruscans and Greeks were eventually conquered and absorbed by the advancing forces of Rome in the second century BC. The Romans, attracted to Greek art and culture, absorbed some Greek and Etruscan practices into their own art and culture; in particular, their polytheistic religions, gods and goddesses. The Roman approach to sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular was, however, quite distinct.
Under the Romans, male sexual dominance over both women and other men was taken for granted: wealthy Roman men frequently kept mistresses, slaves, and boys for sexual pleasure, and both male and female prostitution were legal. Ancient Roman men could have sex with their male or female slaves without fear of social marginalisation or rebuke. What was important to a Roman man’s sense of self was maintaining the semblance of an active masculinity which, in essence, meant that it was preferable to always be the ‘inserter’ rather than receiver. Roman men were preoccupied with maintaining a public façade of masculinity that was predicated on the power of the penis to penetrate another. So, whether one’s sex partner were male or female was irrelevant. Homosexuality was not technically punished unless it violated strict class structures or social roles.
One’s class, social status, and civic responsibility were adhered to more strictly by the Romans than by the Greeks. Roman society tended to be more misogynistic than its Greek predecessor and therefore developed a sexual system by which both women and slaves were viewed as male property and denied any bit of freedom. While most acts of homosexuality by the Romans were confined to encounters between masters and their slaves, and while many philosophers cautioned against pederasty, same-sex love was common enough during the periods of the Roman Republic and Empire to be documented by several Roman historians and biographers. Fuelling homosexuality’s increased practice in imperial Rome was the fact that the majority of the Roman emperors were sexually ambivalent and practised bisexuality. Based on ancient writings and art, homosexuality was not as important a philosophical issue for Romans as it had been for the Greeks. However, many Roman writers did write disapprovingly of it and yet they themselves sometimes engaged in the very act of ‘Greek love’ that they publicly condemned.
Most mentions of homosexuality in the Roman world uphold a firm belief in the value of maintaining social decorum. When homosexuality is discussed, it is used to confirm social stigmas against male passivity and the corrupting influences of sodomy. As in Greece, to be anally penetrated or to perform oral sex were unbecoming of a potential or confirmed Roman citizen and were acts reserved for women (who were technically not considered citizens), male and female slaves and prostitutes. The taboo against anal sex was so strong that, contrary to its practice in ancient Greece, pederasty was strictly forbidden in ancient Rome. Visual imagery of intergenerational courtship and consummation associated with the Greek notion of idealised male love was banned in Roman art. According to John Clarke, however, it is debatable as to what extent the Romans of the late Republic and early Empire actually followed the Greek practice of homosexuality (Clarke, p.291). Although there is far less visual information for male-to-male sexual and erotic activity in Roman art than in Greek art, images of sexual activity – both heterosexual and homosexual – do form a large part of the visual record of Rome.
30. Achilles Binding the Wounds of Patroclus, 6th century BC.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.
Roman artists did not create homoerotic genre scenes or scenes of frank eroticism so popular on Greek vases. A sober morality characterised the Republican period. With the advent of the Roman Empire and influence and wealth from other cultures, Roman Republican morality soon gave way to a kind of sexual permissiveness. By the beginning of the first century AD, the strong taboo against passive men had eroded, and laws against sex with citizen boys were virtually ignored (Saslow, p.44). Many of the emperors of the empire openly indulged these and other sexual urges. Augustus and Nero are just two who readily come to mind – the latter being the most notorious. We are told that Emperor Tiberius, who reigned from 14–37 AD, installed a collection of erotic paintings, sculptures, and sexual manuals in a special suite at his pleasure retreat on the island of Capri. These were used as ‘training tools’ for his entourage of female prostitutes and harem of boys.
Hadrian became legendary as a married Roman emperor who fell passionately in love with an extraordinarily handsome young Bithynian man named Antinous. On a journey to Egypt in 130 AD, Antinous drowned under mysterious circumstances in the Nile. Distraught over his death and having been chastised by several Roman writers for “weeping like a woman”, Hadrian deified him, founded an Egyptian city in his honour (Antinopolis), and immortalised his sensual beauty in many commissioned statues, coins, and medallions that were scattered throughout the Roman Empire. Hadrian’s deeds took place during a time when mutual love within a heterosexual marriage was growing in importance and homosexual relationships seemed to be confined to sexual passions for slave boys. In this sense, Hadrian’s relationship with Antinous harks back to an earlier period of classical Athens in that the story is basically a real-life counterpart to the myth of Zeus and Ganymede – a myth (Jupiter and Ganymede or Catamitus) that was adopted and appreciated by the Romans.
Most of the statues created to immortalise Antinous are beardless ephebes heavily influenced by classical Greek art. Hadrian himself admired Greek culture so much that he grew a beard in emulation of Greek philosophers. Towards the end of the Roman Empire,
