[lbo-talk] Don't Be Silly (Was Re: Michelangelo , . . . .)

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Fri Aug 31 16:33:53 PDT 2007


On 8/26/07, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> "andie" wrote:
> >
> >...You ask whether he liked boys or girls, same as you
> >can ask about...Julius Caesar (liked both)...
>
> There is absolutely no historical evidence of Caesar's supposed bisexual
> paedophilia. There is much evidence that he had affairs with very
> many Senatorial wives, especially those of his antagonists. But the only
> alleged incident of homosexuality, spread about by his bitter
> reactionary enemy Lucullus, concerned his persuasion of the
> notoriously effeminate King Nikomedes (anything but a "boy") of
> Bithynia to finance rental of a big fleet with which he saved
> Lucullus from defeat at the siege of Mityline.
> Lucullus's revenge was an assault against Caesar's *dignitas* by claiming,
> without any evidence at all, that Caesar had exchanged his sexual
> favors in return for that fleet. The canard was used against
> Caesar all his life by the oligarchs and repeated down the millennia
> by prurient "historians."
>
> Shane Mage

Let me add that the biggest insult to Caesar's "dignitas" here, is not that he had sex with a man but that he was the one to be sodomized.... In other words it was not primarily the homosexual act that was used as an attack on Caesar but the fact that he took "the woman's part." If it had been Nicomedes who had been in the "receiving" position then the insult would not have had as much sting. It was the idea that (as Suetonius put it) that "Caesar may have conquered Gaul but Nicomedes conquered Caesar..." that was the insult.

This gives some insight into the patriarchal culture of ancient Rome. Over and over again -- in the poetry of Catullus, in Roman songs, in graffiti, in comedies -- it is made clear that the homosexual act itself was not frowned upon (at least not as much as the Christers would frown upon it) as the position of subservience during sex. If a soldier in the course of raping and pillaging a conquered town forces a young boy to suck his cock, all well and good, but if that same soldier voluntarily sucks another man's (or boy's) cock then the gossips of ancient Rome would condemn him and seek to shame him.

There is a moral parable in imperial and patriarchal hypocrisy here somewhere.

Jerry



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