Faculty of Arts University of Helsinki
GANYMEDE IN THE ART OF ROMAN CAMPANIA ANCIENT ROMAN VIEWERS’
EXPERIENCE OF EROTIC MYTHOLOGICAL ART
Ville Hakanen
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
To be presented for public discussion with the permission of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki, in Porthania, Auditorium PIII, on the 23rd of February, 2022 at 17 o’clock.
Helsinki 2022
ISBN 978-951-51-7856-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-951-51-7857-2 (PDF) Layout: Unigrafia
PunaMusta Oy Joensuu 2022
ABSTRACT
Ancient Roman wall painting and stucco decorations often contain images of erotic desire and images of people marked as erotically desirable. Images of the myth of Ganymede are a case in point. They concentrate on the naked body of a youth whose pose and physique make clear that he is supposed to arouse desire. The youth is accompanied by Jupiter’s eagle, often suggestively holding him from behind.
In ancient literature the myth of Jupiter’s abduction of Ganymede symbolized normative sexual desire felt by adult men for younger men of lesser social standing.
Taken together, this evidence seems to suggest that artistic representations of Ganymede were primarily a food for the erotic fantasies of adult men – a common view regarding much of ancient erotic imagery.
This hypothesis, however, is full of uncertainties. What guarantees that adult men found the images erotic in the manner suggested by literary sources? Could it happen, that a man desired to take the role of the desired Ganymede instead of the desiring Jupiter? The images were also viewed by younger men and women, slaves as well as free. What can we say about their engagement with the images:
did women’s desire follow the familiar path of men or would they rather identify with the feminized role of Ganymede? What about men whose subordinate social status relegated them to a sexual position parallel to Ganymede’s? Should we make assumptions about people’s desires and erotic identifications based on their gender and social status in the first place? Indeed, how did the ancient framework conceptualize sexual desire and its relationship to personal identity? And finally, did it make a difference whether desire was aroused by a real person or an artistic representation?
These questions are fundamental if we want to understand the way ancient viewers experienced the erotic images that surrounded them, to understand the dynamics of ancient viewer’s identification with ancient erotic art. To answer these questions, we need to go further than iconography and the literary and archaeological context of the images. In this work I approach ancient viewers’
experience of erotic images, particularly those representing Ganymede, by taking into account ancient norms of sexual desire and behavior, ancient norms of sex and gender, and discussing them in relation to the modern conceptual framework of Judith Butler’s theory of sex and gender. The discursive character of the ancient conception of sex/gender emerging from this discussion is compatible with the conception of self distinguished in Greco-Roman philosophy and poetry by Christopher Gill. By combining these theoretical frameworks, I am able to propose relatively strict discursive limits for the sexual desire and gendered identification Roman viewers would have experienced as possible. A survey of ancient discussion
regarding the visual incentive of emotions and the way art engages its audience leads me to suggest that identification with art followed the same dynamic as identification in real life.
Consequently, I argue that ancient viewing of erotic art should be understood as participation in a discourse about the correct way of being a desiring person.
This discourse would have been part of the performative production of the norms of sex/gender and the self. These norms enabled ancient people to understand themselves as persons, as proper, “livable” human beings. The existential gravity of the discourse would have rendered it compelling for its participants.
Equipped with this theoretical perspective, I analyze four Campanian wall painting and stucco decorations from the first century CE involving an image of Ganymede. I consider the images as part of an iconographic continuum which refers to the literary tradition of the myth, and look at the images in relation to their archaeological and decorative contexts. My theoretical approach enables me to propose how ancient viewers of Greco-Roman cultural background would have identified with the images. Viewers able to build their selfhood according to the normatively ideal masculine model would have identified with the discursive position represented by the phallic, penetrative desirer – Jupiter in images of Ganymede. As the universal framework of correct personhood, normative masculinity would have guided every viewer’s understanding of themselves. I propose that persons whose bodies and social roles were used as the negative opposite of the masculine ideal – primarily women and slaves – could have experienced the images in a hybrid manner translating the normative model of desiring to conform to feminized sexual roles allotted to them in practice. In images of Ganymede, this means a contemporary identification with Jupiter’s desire and Ganymede’s sexual role. Roman art’s tendency to create potentially contradictory combinations of images would have challenged viewers to find the correct way of desiring. Together with other incoherence in the normative framework, it shows the fundamentally unstable, discursive character of abiding norms of sex and gender in antiquity as well.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work would not have been possible without the help and support of many people and institutions.
I want to thank Professor Kirsi Saarikangas, my principal supervisor, whose calming presence and unwavering confidence in my work have carried me through the long and sometimes arduous process. My other supervisor, Director of the Finnish Institute in Rome, Docent Ria Berg, has provided me not only with perceptive comments but also with a scholarly example of conceptual comprehension combined with a meticulous attention to material detail and warm humor. I thank her also for inviting me to participate, in May 2014, in the Symposium on the Roman courtesan at Villa Lante and in the resulting publication, the outcome of which is the first article of this work (article A).
I am deeply grateful to Associate Professor Jennifer Trimble and Professor Verity Platt, the pre-examiners of this thesis. Their insightful remarks have brought this work to a higher level and their encouragement has helped me through the final stages of the process. I also owe sincere thanks to Professor Caroline Vout for her invaluable critique which sparked me to explain myself better. Obviously, I am fully responsible for any errors or negligence remaining.
I thank the Vice Director of the Finnish Institute in Rome, Dr Elina Pyy, and Dr Samuli Simelius for their support and assistance, their academic example and their inspiring friendship.
I thank the anonymous reviewers of the American Journal of Archaeology, whose remarks on the first unsuccessful version of the second article of this work (article B) pushed me to develop my theoretical thinking and whose remarks on the accepted second version of the article assured me that I had found the right path. I am grateful to Editor-in-Chief Jane B. Carter of the AJA for accepting the article and for her help in tightening my arguments. I would also like to thank Professor John R. Clarke, Professor Jaś Elsner, and Dr Eeva-Maria Viitanen for their insightful comments on various versions of article B, and Professor Clarke for hosting me as a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin during the spring semester of 2016. I owe warm thanks to Dr. Rudolf Känel for his generous assistance regarding the telamones and Jaakko Kalsi for his help with the figures of article B.
My institutional networks have provided me with invaluable support. I want to thank the Doctoral Program in History and Cultural Heritage of the University of Helsinki for granting me a funded doctoral candidate position for three and a half years. In the discipline of Art History, I owe particular thanks to Docent Leena- Maija Rossi (now Professor in the University of Lapland) for her valuable comments
on the third article of this work (article C) and her inspiring example as an art historian and scholar of gender. I have always warmly felt Docent Elina Räsänen’s encouragement and support. The doctoral seminar of Professor Saarikangas has been a safe environment to explore ideas. Among the participants I would like to thank in particular Dr Oscar A. Ortiz and my dear friend Veera Moll for much- needed peer support along the way.
I am grateful to the Finnish Institute in Rome for offering an incomparable framework for scholarship, ideas and friendships ever since my participation, in 2011, in the introductory course to antiquity at Villa Lante under the caring guidance of the then director of the institute, Docent Katariina Mustakallio. I want to thank the Foundation Institutum Romanum Finlandiae and the staff of the Institute, first of all Intendent Simo Örmä. Among the many people whose acquaintance I can trace back to Villa Lante, directly or indirectly, I thank Dr Tuomo Nuorluoto and Urpo Kantola for their assistance with certain linguistic uncertainties. I thank Roosa Kallunki, Anna-Maria Wilskman, and Anna Vuolanto for the shared moments of enthusiasm and frustration. Along with the Finnish Institute, the library of the American Academy in Rome was an important place for this work.
The occasion that initiated me into the hands-on study of antiquity was the Pompeii Project of the University of Helsinki (Expeditio Pompeiana Universitatis Helsingiensis). During the field seasons of 2010-2012, under the tutelage of the director of the project, Docent Antero Tammisto, with the heartfelt support of the whole team, I was encouraged to construct my identity as a student and scholar of Pompeian wall-painting, for which I am forever grateful.
I owe warm thanks to the Parco archeologico di Pompei (formerly Soprintendenza Pompei) for allowing me to study the decorations in Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae discussed in this work in situ, and for granting me authorization to use photos taken at the sites. I also thank the Parco archeologico di Ostia Antica for allowing me to examine the decoration of the House of Jupiter and Ganymede in situ.
Besides the funding of the University of Helsinki, this work has been funded by the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation. I am deeply grateful to these organizations for enabling me to focus full-time on my research.
Robert Whiting has been wonderfully reliable and patient in checking my English from the second article on.
Finally, I want to express my warmest gratitude to my family and friends. I can sincerely and proudly claim (along the lines of my argument in this work) that I am who I am because of the people with whom I have habituated myself with behavior, attitudes and beliefs and with whom I can engage in reflective discourse.
The past couple of years of pandemic-affected life have achingly demonstrated how
important even just the idea of my friends being there for me is, not to mention the importance of the time spent together, hopefully increasing exponentially after the worst is over – both pandemic- and dissertation-wise.
My grandparents Sirkka and Arne Pacius and Anja and Aarno Hakanen have provided me with the kindest possible example of virtue and humanity and sparked my curiosity of the study of antiquity, both by their appreciation of learning and by lending me a collection of Asterix comics when I was a kid. My parents Olli Hakanen and Anneli Pacius, my brother Jussi Hakanen and his spouse Sanni Koskela, I cannot thank you enough for your love and support, for your endless interest in my work and for an internalized model of rational argumentation. My partner Antti Saastamoinen, I love you and thank you for our life together – the most significant frames of this work.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction ...10
2 Ganymede in Roman Culture ... 20
2.1 Ganymede in Ancient Literature ...23
2.2 Ganymede in Roman Art ...27
2.2.1 Material limitations ... 28
2.2.2 Iconography ...32
3 Methodology of the Study of Roman Decorations ...45
4 Summary and Archaeological Contexts of Articles A-C ...53
4.1 Casa di Ganimede and House IX 5, 11.13 in Pompeii (Article A) ...54
4.2 Forum Baths in Pompeii (Article B) ...56
4.3 Villa Arianna at Stabiae (Article C) ...57
5 Sexual Desire and Ancient Conceptions of “Gender” and “Sex”... 60
5.1 The Penetration Model ... 61
5.2 Masculine Gender Status and Sexual Desire ...66
5.3 Discursive Construction of “Sex” and “Gender” ... 71
5.4 Femininity and Womanhood ...76
5.4.1 Virtue and Womanhood ...79
5.4.2 Erotic Experience of Female-Identifying Persons ... 84
6 The Roman Self and Erotic Experience ... 91
6.1 Foucault, Gill, and Butler: Erotic Experience, Selfhood, and Performativity ...93
6.2 Objective-Participant Conception of Selfhood ... 98
6.3 Identification, Virtue, Shame ...106
7 Viewing of Art in Rome ...116
7.1 Persuasive Inner Images and Mimesis in Plato and Aristotle...119
7.2 Stoic Phantasia and Engagement with Art ...125
7.3 Roman Viewers’ Identification with Erotic Art ...132
8 Conclusions - Roman Viewers’ Identification with Images of Ganymede ...146
8.1 Casa di Ganimede and House IX 5, 11.13 in Pompeii (Article A) ...150
8.2 Forum Baths in Pompeii (Article B) ...153
8.3 Villa Arianna at Stabiae (Article C) ...155
8.4 Coda: Roman Sarcophagus Reliefs and Normative Identification ... 157
Bibliography ...161
Plates ... 176
Original Articles ...184
LIST OF ORIGINAL ARTICLES
This thesis is based on two previously published peer-reviewed research articles and one article manuscript. Each article is referred to in the text by its letter.
Article A
Hakanen, Ville. 2018. “A perfect scenery for male courtesans? Ganymede in two Pompeian wall paintings.” In The roman courtesan : archaeological reflections of a literary topos, edited by R. Berg and R. Neudecker, in the series Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae vol. 46. Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, 167-181.
Article B
Hakanen, Ville. 2020. “Normative Masculinity and the Decoration of the Forum Baths in Pompeii.” American Journal of Archaeology 124(1): 37-71.
Article C
Hakanen, Ville. “Roman Viewers’ Identification with Erotic Mythological Paintings – A Theoretical Approach in Practice.” Unpublished article manuscript.
1 INTRODUCTION
The naked male figure has the slender body of an athletic adolescent with fleshy musculature but no pubic hair. He wears a cape, chlamys, that merely frames his nudity, a pointed Phrygian cap and a pair of intricate Phrygian boots, if he is not barefoot. His hair is curly and longer in the back. His poses vary between a languid repose and a ballet dancer’s dive, but they all share an air of ease and composure – despite the fact that the youth is in the presence of a large eagle, which either observes him from a tree, carries him in the air or is served by him on the ground. The shepherd’s stick, pedum, or hunting spears that the youth often carries with him lie unused by his side. The eagle is usually proud-looking:
puffy-chested, forceful, sometimes outright fierce. There is a tension between the bird’s dynamism and the gentle staticity of the youth.
This description applies to a number of representations of the myth of Ganymede from the first century CE Italian peninsula. According to ancient sources, Ganymede was a beautiful Trojan prince, whom Jupiter, in the shape of an eagle, abducted and made his cup-bearer and lover. Jupiter and Ganymede became a symbol of adult men’s sexual desire for younger men and boys. Images of the myth emphasize this association through the normatively desirable body of Ganymede and his generous nudity, through the sexually suggestive poses of the couple, and sometimes by placing a baby Eros between the two. These images seem to represent a homoerotic fantasy, where one partner is the plain embodiment of an animal desire aroused by the other partner who is passive and overtly eroticized.
However, as soon as the scene is labeled “homoerotic” it becomes loaded with an entire sphere of associations most of which have little to do with antiquity. By singling out representations of the myth of Ganymede from representations of other eroticized figures, strikingly similar in shape but desired by female deities (for instance, Endymion and Adonis) or themselves female (like Europa, Leda, and Ariadne), I assume that Ganymede was special for the fact that he was a man desired by a male god. My reason for this assumption might be that I have grown into thinking that people have subjective, personal sexual identities, some of which conform to the norms of their society more than others, and that same-sex desire often forms the basis for identities that differ from the mainstream. Consequently, I might suggest that a significant reason for the production of images of the myth of Ganymede and, at least, a significant reason for enjoying them as viewers, would have been the nourishment of a desire the recognition of which could have functioned as an incentive to construct a corresponding identity. This identity, in turn, would have needed external assertion in the form of representations. All of a sudden, we would have a perspective on images of Ganymede that is male
and distinctively modern in the sense that it focuses on same-sex desire but does not, as such, make a distinction between the status of the parties of the desire, its subject and object, Jupiter and Ganymede.
If we want to consider the difference between Jupiter and Ganymede – an active, dominating, perhaps symbolically phallic, but otherwise non-eroticized subject of desire and a passive/subservient, overtly eroticized object of desire – we should shift our focus from homoeroticism to social status and gender. Such a perspective would align Ganymede with parallel figures, both male and female, who are young, sexy, and passive – feminized – displayed for the gaze of their desirers. The motivation behind the creation and enjoyment of images of Ganymede would still be desire, but desire that is not different by default from desire aroused by similar female figures or similar male figures beloved by goddesses. This would seem to conform with ancient thinking that was mostly concerned with the way sexual behavior reflected people’s social and gender status. But where does this perspective leave the desire of viewers whose sexual and social status was parallel to Ganymede? Should we think of female viewers automatically identifying with the position of feminized figures like Ganymede, Narcissus or Ariadne? Or is their identification based on the apparent sex of the figure? In fact, how does people’s identification with sex and gender function in the first place and can we understand the way it functioned in antiquity?
As we see, an image of a relatively simple-looking erotic scenario soon leads to highly complex, abstract questions if we seek to understand the way it was experienced in antiquity. Similar questions would arise regarding viewers’
response to an erotic image today, but in the case of antiquity we must try to bridge the gap between conceptual frameworks of selfhood, sex/gender, and art separated by almost two millennia. This might sound like a project doomed to fail, but I argue that it is not. On the contrary, it provides us with a theoretical understanding which is not limited to an individual ancient work of art or an individual decoration, to an individual ancient viewer on a particular occasion of viewing, or to the viewers whose perspective is represented in the preserved literary sources. By understanding the dynamics of ancient selfhood and its connection to the norms and ideals of sex/gender, by understanding the way artworks were thought to function in regard to the audience’s feelings and desires, we gain a perspective which enables us to hypothesize on a firm basis with the experience of all the viewers who were part of the Greco-Roman culture. This is what I venture to do in this study.
Articles A-C
But this is not where my work began. This investigation started as the study of the “homoerotic” subject of Ganymede in Roman wall paintings and stucco decorations. Because Roman images of Ganymede are always part of decorations
which include other mythological images, it was clear from the beginning that the scope of the study would be somewhat wider, but it was still motivated by my interest in examining if and how the viewing of images of Ganymede could be thought to differ from the viewing of “heteroerotic” images. My research questions in the first article A perfect scenery for male courtesans? Ganymede in two Pompeian wall paintings (from now on article A), published in 2018, was whether a couple of Pompeian houses with paintings of Ganymede (plates 1-2) could be connected to male prostitution, and what the erotic roles represented in the paintings and the images surrounding them were.1 I was interested in speculating on how an ancient Roman (adult male) viewer could have reflected on himself in these roles.
I thought that a tension between the desirable erotic possibilities represented by the paintings and the norms of the viewer’s social circumstances might have made an image of Ganymede an appropriate mirror for tensions involved in male prostitution from the perspective of a male customer. These tensions regarded in particular the gendered position of being the penetrated partner in sex.
The second article, published in 2020, Normative Masculinity and the Decoration of the Tepidarium of the Forum Baths in Pompeii (article B) was a long time in the making.2 During the writing I began to realize the complexity of the questions involved in studying ancient experience of gendered representations of people, such as erotic images. I needed a better theoretical grasp of the subject of gender and identification and found aid in Judith Butler’s performativity theory. Feminist film theory, particularly Teresa de Lauretis’s discussion of female spectators’ identification in modern narrative cinema, provided me with additional perspectives to consider female viewers’ point of view. I ended up analyzing the images in the tepidarium, including a stucco relief of Ganymede (plate 3), as materializations of masculinity that both referred to the norm and participated in its construction. My research question was how the images in the baths relate to Roman masculinity. How would they have been objectified and identified with according to the norm? How did the context frame the images and affect their viewing? Based on Butler’s theory, I suggested that viewers would have identified with the norm through the images, which staged a discourse regarding the ideals of Roman masculinity. Based on the ancient conception of selfhood, with the aid of de Lauretis, I suggested that all the viewers, male and female, would have identified with the images guided by the masculine norm.
The third and final article of the dissertation, Roman Viewers’ Identification with Erotic Mythological Paintings - A Theoretical Approach in Practice (article C) took the theoretical discussion initiated in article B further. I entered deeper
1 Hakanen 2018 (article A).
2 Hakanen 2020 (article B).
into the theoretical thinking regarding the ancient conception of the self, directed by Christopher Gill’s extensive studies on the subject. I suggested that the ancient norm of personhood is comparable with Butler’s idea of sex/gender as both are essentially discursive in character and challenge the thought of the self based on an individual, subjective essence or truth. In the article I asked if one could challenge the norm even when immersed in the fantastic realm of art. Did the internalized drive to be the normative self permit a transgressive identification that would have undermined the credibility of that self? My case study of the wall painting decoration from Stabiae, including a picture of Ganymede (plate 4), demonstrates that my basic interest is the same as in the previous articles:
What were the points of identification offered by the paintings for the Roman viewers? And did it make a difference whether the viewer was a man or a woman, slave or free? The theoretical framework enabled me to face these questions more straightforwardly and to give more confident answers.
Structure
As the scope of the articles has proceeded further and further from the individual images of the myth of Ganymede, it is now time to close the circle and re-connect the theoretical thinking to the images that constituted the incentive for it. I open this report by giving the basic information about the material that constitutes the common thread between the articles, the myth of Ganymede in ancient, particularly Roman, art and culture (chapter 2). This outlook is intended to provide a tangible beginning for the study. Its emphases are dictated by the subsequent discussion and it is therefore a rather enlightened introduction to my material.
Before heading into the theoretical venture leading up to a reading of this material from the point of view of Roman viewers’ sexual subjectivity, it is appropriate to take a look at the methods and theoretical approaches used in preceding scholarship of Roman mythological art in the domestic sphere. In chapter 3, I discuss the methodology of recent scholarship of Roman art and the conclusions reached with currently available theoretical approaches. My scope is to show the need for novel theoretical thinking. The following chapter 4 provides the summaries of articles A-C representing different stages of theoretical sophistication. One point of the section is to tie the approaches adopted in the articles to the existing methodological framework discussed in the preceding chapter 3. Archaeological contextualization is a fundamental element of the study of ancient art, and this study makes no exception. The summaries in chapter 4 also provide the relevant basics of the archaeological contexts of the decorations studied in the articles.
These background essentials are then left aside for a while as I set out to develop the final version of my theoretical understanding of Roman viewers’
frames for experiencing erotic mythological art. One of the components of this
understanding is ancient norms of sexual desire, which were entangled with ancient norms of sex/gender, all of which must be translated to the language of our conceptual framework in order to be comprehensible to us. This is what I do in section 5, where I base my thinking on a wide range of scholarship on ancient sexuality and sex/gender and on Judith Butler’s theory of sex/gender.
Another central component of my theoretical understanding is the ancient conception of the self, its relationship to virtue and, thus, to gender and sexual desire. This is what I explore in chapter 6 with the help of Christopher Gill’s scholarship, which I discuss in relation to Michel Foucault’s and Butler’s ideas. The scholarly arguments and approaches integrated into the theoretical perspective of chapters 5 and 6 are mostly linked by their discursive take on the formation of what is now thought of as “identity.”
The third major component of my theoretical framework is the ancient philosophical discourse about the relationship between desire and perception and audience response to art. This is what I study in chapter 7 with the help of Jessica Moss’s studies of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thinking, Stephen Halliwell’s study of the ancient conception of mimesis, and a wider selection of scholarship about the Stoic ideas of cognition and art. In the final sub-section 7.3, I conclude my theoretical approach on ancient Roman viewers’ experience of erotic art.
In the concluding chapter 8, I return to the concrete material of the decorations studied in articles A-C. Endowed with the theoretical perspective constructed in the preceding chapters, I take a final look at the decorations, particularly the images of Ganymede, and read them from the point of view of ancient Roman viewers.
In the case of the decorations of article A, written before any serious theoretical involvement on my part, the re-interpretation is somewhat different from what I wrote in the article. In the case of the more and more theoretically informed articles B and C, the final reading is very similar, if not identical. Ultimately, the decorations are used in this work as case studies for testing the application of the theoretical apparatus in practice. However, as the first part of the paper and the articles amply demonstrate, the theory has in fact been developed in an organic dialect with the material.
The last sub-section of the concluding chapter 8 is dedicated to a look forward from the timespan and context of my material towards another large Roman corpus of mythological art: sarcophagus reliefs. In this section I do not try so much to introduce new theoretical thinking to the field which has become a focal point for interest in the psychology of viewing, but to adapt my theoretical perspective to recent thinking regarding erotic myths on Roman sarcophagi. My aim is to prove that the conclusions reached in the field are not in conflict with the conclusions of this study. On the contrary, I see my conclusions as widely generalizable with certain preconditions.
Some Conceptual Premises
As is probably clear by now, the bigger part of this work discusses concepts. It is through attempting to define what we mean by “gender,” “sex,” “sexuality,”
“self,” and “identification” that we begin to distinguish patterns and ultimately a framework – or to use Butler’s term, “matrix” – within which we can understand people’s behavior and make generalization about it. However, it might be appropriate to briefly establish some premises for understanding the title of this work, Ganymede in the Art of Roman Campania – Ancient Roman Viewers’
Experience of Erotic Mythological Art. How does one distinguish “erotic art” and how is one’s experience of it approached? Is the former not dependent on one’s experience of what is “erotic”?
In the collection of articles, The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome (2002), edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, “erotic experience” emerges between the lines as a sort of real- life application or experience of the normative framework of sexual ethics. The articles approach the subject through literary sources, through ancient narratives dealing with sexual behavior and erotic desire often written in the first person, which makes it hard to deny the validity of the term “erotic experience.” When no literary account confirms that an image is experienced as erotic, how does one confirm that it should be studied as such?
The online dictionary wiktionary.org gives the following definition for
“erotic”: “relating to or tending to arouse sexual desire or excitement.” Since the mythological images that I focus on in this paper represent narrative scenarios, it is possible to determine quite objectively whether the scene relates to sexual desire – in the images studied in this work it is the main operating force of the narrative, at least in the represented scene. It is also possible to distinguish elements in the images that, according to ancient conventions, tended to arouse desire, such as nudity in certain poses and as the attribute of certain body types. Moreover, in all the decorations studied in this work, images determinable as erotic on the aforementioned criteria form combinations where each component reinforces another.
When it comes to experience – how people experienced these depictions of sexual desire – I offer a related approach to the one represented by the authors of The Sleep of Reason. As discussed further in the theoretical part of this study, I propose that people’s sexual desires, their attitudes to other people’s desires, the execution of these desires, and even unfulfilled sexual fantasies are preceded – are enabled – by identifications that are enabled, in turn, by discourses that make it possible for people to understand their feelings and act within the social sphere that comprises most sexual scenarios. Chapters 5-7 are dedicated to a theoretical analysis of how this happens and how it can be conceptualized.
At the same time, I am conscious of the restrictions of theoretical rationalization of something so volatile and fugitive as an erotic feeling. The schematic models of identification resulting in certain modes of thinking and excluding others seem simplistic – particularly when they attempt to explain one of the most mystifying and personally grappling parts of human experience. Would I be able to see myself within the matrix I have created, functioning as I hypothesize others would? In principle – most probably. In practice – I am not so sure. What external impulses do I experience as erotic and why? Which supposedly erotic scenarios do I dive into and which do I reject or ignore – and how do I make these more or (probably) less conscious selections? In the heat of the moment, it is hard to say. But I believe that the general pattern represented by Butler’s performativity theory and extended to antiquity through more site-specific theories of sexuality, sex/gender, and personality in this study is both valid and valuable as an attempt to conceptualize something so important, yet so vague.
Contribution
The approach adopted in this work enables me, in short, to analyze the ancient experience of erotic art within the frameworks of ancient norms of selfhood and sex/gender. I propose that these norms would have set limits on the ways ancient viewers could have imagined themselves as sexual desirers and actors. Ancient erotic images can be thought to have participated in a discourse that constantly asserted and reasserted the norms and ideals of the correct ways of being a sexual human being. This does not mean that the images would have provided concrete role models. It means that they would have evoked the same norms that constituted the basis of the viewers’ understanding of themselves as sexual beings and ethical agents. As the viewers constructed their selves performatively by repetitious citing of these norms, both the images and the viewers can be considered participants in the same discourse.
As I discuss in chapters 5-7, the question about the correct way of being a person regarded everyone. Everyone who shared the same Greco-Roman culture and value base would have had a stake in the discourse. Consequently, we are able to analyze not only the elite men’s perspective dominating the literary sources. We gain access even to the normative frames of the perspective of female-identified/
identifying persons and slaves whose point of view is hard to come by in ancient material. Since the social status of these viewers would often have been in conflict with the normative model of sexual agency, I propose to see their experience as a hybrid between the model and a discursively established perspective conditioned by their practical circumstances.
I see my theoretical contribution as a combination of previously separate scholarly discourses, as match-making between thoughts that share the same intellectual basis and interest, that complement each other, but have not been
seen together. I seek to demonstrate conceptual bridges between our frames of understanding and the ancient mindset. As a scholar of art history, I have comprehended this structure with images in mind: my scope is in the interpretation of images. This is what I have done in the articles of this dissertation and this is what I do in the concluding chapter 8. The philosophical scholarship I rely on, most importantly Gill’s, Moss’s and Halliwell’s studies, has been chosen organically, based on the cogency of the answers it has been able to provide to the questions I have come across during the thought process involved in this study – not to mention the approving reception of these studies in the field of ancient philosophy.3 As I have argued in the articles and will further demonstrate in this work, Butler’s theory is parallel to ancient thinking and can thus be used as a solid conceptual bridge between the ancient framework and ours.
But the theoretical approach adopted in this investigation also has ethical implications. As scholars of antiquity, we have an ethical responsibility towards our contemporary readers, the ones whose lives our representation of concepts like
“sex” and “gender” can affect in practice. And we have a responsibility towards the ancient people whose lives we should be able to represent in all their diversity and complexity. The deconstruction of essential ideas of “womanhood” and “manhood,”
promoted by Butler’s theory, gives space for the different variants on the spectrum of sex/gender. As a result, no way of being, social or physical, is anchored as the natural, self-evident origin of human experience and human existence in the world.
Instead, categories like “womanhood” and “manhood,” powerful and schematic as they are, are demonstrated to be indistinguishable from the discourse that describes them and, consequently, best understandable and definable by studying these discourses.
This deconstruction has the advantage of opening up a scenario where the various types of psychophysical subjects we humans are would have a chance to perform various creative versions of the binary gender norms which we might end up modifying in the long run. And it does not question the physical way sex/gender is experienced. Performativity theory enables us to see the conceptualizations of these experiences as products and participants of a highly compelling discourse which affects how we see our bodies and how we understand “livable” embodiments of sex/gender. Within this equation, our bodies must conform to our gendered experience in the right way. As I discuss in section 5.3, the way Euro-American cultures conceptualize bodies (or even matter in general) is sexed through and through so that it becomes impossible to discern the one from the other. Therefore, to claim, according to a seemingly common simplification, that Butler treats the body as if it was a canvas on which culture paints images of gender and thus
3 See, e.g., Ford 2003; Tuozzo 2014; Waterfield 1996; Reydams-Schils 2008.
ignores “the body” of flesh and blood, is in my mind simply wrong. The way we, as scholars of ideas, can approach the body of flesh and blood is through ideas and we cannot get a grasp of the body prior to its conceptualization as an idea – there is no canvas that would not already be painted.
The nature of matter itself seems to resist the normalizing tendencies of scientific conceptualization. Karen Barad approaches matter through the stimulatingly queer findings of quantum field theory, which they use to elaborate Butler’s thinking. Barad characterizes matter as “an imaginative material exploration of non/being, creatively regenerative, an ongoing trans*/formation”
exemplified by the “intra-active trans*material performativity” of electrons.4 Barad’s concept of intra-activity “recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action,” and yet, matter is “ever lively, never identical with itself, it is uncountably multiple, mutable” representing “a radical undoing of ‘self,’ of individualism.”5 Barad’s queer activation of matter (and “the body” as its offspring), stemming from an in-depth understanding of theoretical physics, is inspiring to think with about contemporary and future realities and utopias, but it might also be useful to unsettle our ideas regarding the materiality of the bodies of the past. We cannot ask an ancient person about their embodied experience. “Ancient bodies,” therefore, are bound to be our constructions of ancient bodies. Barad’s idea of trans materiality might help us resist normalizing these bodies and to keep our conception of the ancient material reality open-ended.
Despite its electrifying influence on queer and trans scholarship, Butler’s theory of performativity has been criticized for insensitivity towards the experiences of transsexual women and the practical issues they face in the modern-contemporary world.6 Raewyn Connell proposes an idea of “social embodiment” to better address these realities and bodies in general.7 This idea “could be called ‘body-reflexive practice’, i.e. human social conduct in which bodies are both agents and objects.”8 Besides allowing some sort of agency for the body, the theory of social embodiment recognizes that “bodies have a reality that cannot be reduced; they are drawn into history without ceasing to be bodies. They do not turn into signs or positions in discourse (though discourses constantly refer to them). Their materiality continues to matter.”9 However, Connell fails to explicate the relationship between the agency of bodies and sex/gender. If the body has an agency and materiality that can
4 Barad 2015, 411, 401.
5 Barad 2007, 33; 2015 411.
6 Connell 2012 (with further references).
7 Connell 2012; Connell and Pearse 2015. For the concept of “masculinities,” inspired by Connell’s work, see below note 264.
8 Connell and Pearse 2015.
9 Connell and Pearse 2015.
be distinguished from its socio-cultural conceptualization, is this agency and materiality already sexed? That “social embodiment” is proposed as a better tool to discuss transsexual women’s experiences than performativity theory could suggest as much. Although Connell explicitly opposes an essentialist understanding of sex/gender,10 the ambiguity of the concept of “social embodiment” risks to be interpreted as allowing a physical/biological origin for the binary sex/gender, or, at least, enabling such an assumption to remain unquestioned. This risk is particularly high when studying a past culture and its long-gone “reality of bodies” – a reality which we might be tempted to reconstruct from our own normative premises.
Therefore, in the ancient context I can see very little to gain and much to lose in insisting on the primacy of the body to discourse.
The theoretical take on ancient sex/gender in this study enables us to see the marginalized, rejected, non-normative persons of ancient sources in terms of a projection of abject qualities, usually “femininity” or “womanhood”
and slavishness, on bodies and ways of behavior instead of constructing fixed, apparently coherent “identities,” personality types, or “bodies” for these persons.
The label of cinaedus, for instance, can be considered, precisely, a label, a term of abuse, not a knowable type (see sections 5.1 and 6.3). If we refrain from establishing non-normative, less than hegemonic types of persons, we are able to recognize the fundamental incoherence of the norm - usually “manhood” - and to show that, instead of being the authentic original from which others deviate, it is entirely dependent on the negatives it constructs for itself to remain a positive. As will be shown, even the experiences of marginalized, non-normative persons can be hypothesized by looking at the norms rather than constructing for them an identity and/or a body on the basis of hostile sources and our own ideas of sex/gender and sexuality.
All in all, this work is a study of four decorations from Roman Campania of the first century CE involving an image of the myth of Ganymede. This work, in particular, is also a contribution to the study of the myth of Ganymede in ancient art and culture. But ultimately, I consider one of the main contributions of this project to be the outlining of a theoretical approach that enables me to suggest how ancient Roman viewers would have identified with these images. I expect that this theoretical approach would be applicable to any erotic image from first- century CE Rome, but this waits to be proved or denied by future scholarship.
10 Connell (2012, 865) writes: “We should not give up the intellectual advances of poststructuralism and transgender studies by retreating to an essentialist transsexual discourse.”
2 GANYMEDE IN ROMAN CULTURE
This study is not the first modern piece of scholarship on the myth of Ganymede in classical art and culture. In 1953 Hellmut Sichtermann published Ganymed:
Mythos und Gestalt in der antiken Kunst, a survey of the myth in antiquity, which considers literary sources side by side with images and ends with a complete catalogue of the artistic representations of the myth known at the time. It continued the thematic and methodological path opened three years earlier by Reinhard Herbig’s concise treatment of the motif of Ganymede ministering to the eagle in ancient art.11 Sichtermann’s output on the knowledge of the iconography of Ganymede in antiquity went further than his scholarly debut. In articles published between 1976 and 1992 he concentrates on particular iconographic types of the myth and on the myth’s representations in Roman sarcophagus reliefs.12 The last, published in the authoritative series Die antiken Sarkophagreliefs, includes a lucid discussion of the myth’s significance in the funerary context. Sichtermann’s work on the myth’s history in ancient art culminated in the definitive catalogue of Ganymede’s ancient representations in the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC) on which occasion Sichtermann also outlines the history of the myth’s iconography.
Ancient mosaics representing Ganymede have received a fair deal of attention on their own. Their iconography and its chronology have been discussed at length by Kyle M. Phillips and Louis Foucher and, more recently, with more socio- cultural insight, by Christine Kondoleon.13 Isabella Colpo’s article from 2005 on the representations of Ganymede found at Pompeii has a geographical scope which, however, includes most of the ancient wall paintings of the myth.14 Colpo distinguishes iconographic groups and discusses their sources in Sichtermann’s footsteps. But she also analyzes the images as parts of their specific archaeological and decorative contexts in order to better understand the choices made by the artists while reproducing and modifying particular iconographic models and to comprehend the possible motives of patrons for choosing certain iconographic types and combinations of subjects. In addition, many pieces of scholarship discuss ancient representations of Ganymede to explain individual works of art.15 The most significant from the point of view of this study is John R. Clarke’s 1991 article The
11 Herbig 1949.
12 Sichtermann 1953; Sichtermann 1976; Sichtermann 1984; ASR 12.2; LIMC, “Ganymedes”.
13 Phillips 1960; Foucher 1979; Kondoleon 1995, 133-146.
14 Colpo 2005.
15 See, e.g., Gazda 1981 and Tsakirgis 1989.
Decor of the House of Jupiter and Ganymede at Ostia Antica: Private Residence Turned Gay Hotel?16
Besides studies discussing strictly ancient material, a couple of monographs and a well-made exhibition catalogue focus on Ganymede’s classical legacy in Renaissance art and culture.17 James M. Saslow’s Ganymede in the Renaissance:
Homosexuality in Art and Society, published in 1986, concentrates on the myth’s Renaissance iconography and its sources. An updated view on the same theme is provided by the catalogue of a 2002 exhibition Il mito di Ganimede prima e dopo Michelangelo, curated by Marcella Marongiu. Leonard Barkan’s Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism from 1991 discusses the myth’s adaptation to Renaissance sensibilities both in literature and in art.
Like the work at hand, these works of scholarship reflect the time they were written and the objectives of their writers. Sichtermann is interested in analyzing the iconographic and chronological development of the myth and less so in its social contextualization. His tone regarding the erotic aspect of the studied works of art is unemphatic and matter-of-fact. Clarke’s article and Saslow’s and Barkan’s books, in contrast, build their entire arguments around the erotic significance of the myth. These works are characterized by a willingness to address the history of homosexuality but also a lack of theoretical tools to do it properly – an understandable problem facing pioneers in any field. Barkan’s approach is the most conceptual and most thoroughly in touch with ancient (mostly Greek) literary sources. Although he makes an approving reference to the most up-to-date scholarship on ancient sexuality of the time (David Halperin, see below), he insists on treating homosexuality as a universal, atemporal phenomenon, something
“concerning feelings of love and mutuality” ultimately independent of the norms of a particular society.18 Moreover, Barkan’s idea of ancient “homosexuality” is fundamentally one-sided as it takes the perspective of the dominating partner to stand for the mutual feelings and desires of both partners of the ancient
“homosexual” couple – including the dominated partner who never gets an authentic voice in the ancient material (see chapter 5 below).19 Clarke’s premises are parallel, though less articulate. He has since acknowledged the anachronism of using modern sexual categories to explain ancient material.20
16 Clarke 1991.
17 An often quoted doctoral dissertation by Penelope Cromwell Mayo, Amor spiritualis et carnalis: Aspects of the Myth of Ganymede in Art (1967) has a similar chronological scope. I have not been able to study the work, but Sichtermann (ASR 12.2 65-66) shows it to be severely outdated.
18 Barkan 1991, 23.
19 Barkan 1991, 19-26.
20 Clarke 1991; idem. 1998, 88.
Colpo’s article is extremely valuable as a solid outlook on the basic premises of the Pompeian material including most of the representations of Ganymede discussed in the articles of this dissertation. However, its well-defined methodology and scope leave aside the experience of the viewers, apart from the perspectives of the craftsman and the patron understood as dictated by practical concerns.
Colpo’s take on the erotic side of the images does not dive deeper into questions of sexuality and gender.
My approach differs considerably from my predecessors in its theoretical emphasis, which aims at understanding the impact of images of Ganymede on the self-conception of ancient viewers, particularly on the sexual subjectivity of Roman viewers of all genders and social statuses. I construct this theoretical framework from relevant discussions of such concepts as sex/gender, sexuality, selfhood, and viewing. This study is mostly dedicated to the development and motivation of this framework.
Because of the abstraction required by theoretical thinking, I end up quite far from the representations of Ganymede with which I began this project. One of the advantages of a theoretical approach is that it enables one to break away from material singularity and discern a wider picture – in this case of erotic images in general. A comprehensive theoretical perspective also makes it easier to analyze the studied decorations as coherent wholes. The articles of this dissertation and much of this work discuss quite equally all the central pictures included in the particular decorations. The image of Ganymede is treated as part of an ensemble of pictures, and an accompanying mythological image might easily be switched into its place as the figurehead of the project. Ultimately all the images and their decorative contexts end up functioning as case studies for the theoretical apparatus.
However, it is valuable to retain open and explicit the circular relationship between material and theory. As demonstrated by Saslow, Clarke and Barkan, there is something in the myth of Ganymede and its artistic representations that fascinates the modern mind, if only for modern reasons. It is this same something, I believe, that made me choose images of Ganymede as the starting point of my dissertation project years ago. By studying these images in a similar manner as my distinguished predecessors, perhaps with only slightly different preconceptions in mind, I began to realize my personal point of interest and the consequent need for alternative ways of thinking – the need for a wide theoretical perspective. Therefore, it is only fair to open this work with an outlook on the basic understanding I now have of the myth’s place in Roman culture. Moreover, pictures of Ganymede remain the clearest concrete element connecting the three articles of this study and as such they provide the reader with a necessary common thread to follow – at least at the beginning of the journey.
In the following subsections I outline the literary and artistic history of the myth of Ganymede. Section 2.1 discusses the myth in ancient literature with a
focus on Roman literature. Section 2.2, with its two subsections, discusses first the concrete character of the images of Ganymede studied in this work, and then the art historical contexts of the iconographic types represented by the studied images.
The emphases of this outlook are based on the overall picture I have gained during this dissertation project and are purposeful in looking forward towards the more theoretically informed analysis of subsequent sections. In particular, section 2.2 on the myth in Roman art is partial to the particular case studies of this work.
However, my aim is to provide the reader with the traditional basics for recognizing the material that connects the articles of this study and for understanding its specific character.
2.1 Ganymede in Ancient Literature
The myth of Ganymede tells the story of a Trojan prince, the son of king Tros, who was so beautiful, indeed “godlike” (antítheos, Hom. Il. 20.232), that he caught the attention of gods, who abducted the youth to become Zeus’s cup-bearer and make him immortal like them. As a compensation for his son, Tros received horses from Zeus. This story is found already in Homer’s Iliad (5.265-267, 20.232-235). The archaic Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (5.202-217) enriches the myth by further lingering on Ganymede’s beauty, Tros’s grief, Zeus’s compensation and Ganymede’s eternally young destiny. An explicitly pederastic interpretation of the myth is first found in a fragment of Ibycus’s poetry (fr. 289), followed by writers like Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides and Plato, who referred to Zeus’s desire for Ganymede and the youth’s role as Zeus’s bedmate.21 Plato (Leg. 636 c-d) states that the myth was invented altogether in order that, following Zeus’s example, men might “enjoy this pleasure as well.” This is also the sense in which Ganymede (in the Latinized form Catamitus) makes his first appearance in Roman literature, in Plautus’s Menaechmi (143-146), discussed in articles A and C.
In Rome, the epic Trojan pedigree of Ganymede earned him a rather surprising spot in the ancestral hall of fame. Vergil’s Aeneid connects the roots of the Roman people to the world of Homer’s epic through the Trojan hero Aeneas, who, after escaping the destruction of Troy, landed in Italy and sired the family line that went through Romulus and Remus to Julius Caesar and Augustus. In the aforementioned Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Ganymede is given as an example of the Trojans loved by gods, a parallel to his later relative, the member of the Trojan royal house Anchises, who was loved by Aphrodite. Aeneas was the son born from
21 Ibycus, fr. 289; Pin. Ol. 1.43-5; Soph. fr. 345; Eur. Cyc. 582-84, IA 1149-53, Or. 1390-92; Pl. Phdr. 255 b-c, Leg. 636 c-d; Xen. Symp. 8.30;
this union. In the fifth book of the Aeneid (5.254-257) a ship race is organized to commemorate the anniversary of Anchises’s funeral. It ends with a prize ceremony in which the winner receives a cloak with an embroidered representation of the abduction of Ganymede: The Trojan prince is seen hunting on Mount Ida when Jupiter’s eagle snatches him and carries him to heaven, leaving his companions and hounds in despair. Through this ekphrasis, Ganymede is made a symbol of the Trojan roots of the Roman people and the special role of the Romans in the hearts of the gods.22
Whereas Vergil’s words seem to imply that the eagle was Jupiter’s henchman, Propertius (2.30.30) and Ovid (met. 10.155-161) speak of the bird as the transformed Jupiter himself. Vergil’s apparent neglect of the happy ending of the myth, which so far had constituted its main element, is somewhat balanced by a reference to
“the honors paid to the abducted Ganymede” (1.28: rapti Ganymedis honores) at the very beginning of the Aeneid.23 Moreover, Ganymede’s second most influential appearance in Roman literature, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10.155-161), names the youth as the prime example of “boys beloved by gods” (10.152-153: pueros dilectos) and as the cup-bearer of Jupiter. In any case, Vergil’s ekphrasis inspired similar ekphraseis in later Roman epics, which represent the abduction of Ganymede in a highly similar tone, but also allude, more or less explicitly, to the youth’s heavenly destiny.24 These imitations suggest that the myth had become something of an epic commonplace, able to evoke the original Vergilian ekphrasis and, through it, the whole idea of the predestined fate of the Roman people.25
Despite the myth’s novel status as an epic epitome, the erotic aura of Ganymede persisted in Rome. In Greek elegiac poetry the abduction of Ganymede had been deployed to ratify the speaker’s desire for his beloved youth,26 and Hellenistic epigrammatists often addressed Zeus as an accomplice in their own desire, or even
22 See Hardie 2002; Putnam 1998.
23 Jupiter’s favoring of Ganymede is given as one of the reasons for Juno’s hatred of the Trojans. This launched a popular literary motif of Juno’s jealousy of Ganymede, see Ov. fast. 6.43, met. 10.160-61; A.P. 12.77;
Martial 11.43; Macr. Sat. 5.16.11.
24 In Valerius Flaccus’s Argonauts (2.414-417) an embroidered cloak includes images of the abduction of Ganymede and the “happy” (laetus) youth serving the table of Jupiter and even ministering to the eagle.
In Statius’s Thebaid (1.548-551) an image of the abduction of Ganymede is wrought on a cup, from which a libation is poured at a royal banquet – a setting strongly suggestive of Ganymede’s heavenly destiny. In Silius Italicus’s Punica (15.420-432) a cloak is embroidered with an image of the abduction of Ganymede and another one of Odysseus offering a wine cup to the man-devouring Cyclops, a more sinister type of allusion to Ganymede’s future role.
25 This fate might be seen in a grim or celebratory light. Putnam (1998) reads the whole of the Aeneid as pessimistic, which reflects on his reading of the Ganymede ekphrasis. Agoustakis’s (2003) reading of Silius’s ekphrasis follows this pessimistic view. Hardie (2002) sees the Aeneid as a whole in a positive light, which reflects on his reading of the Ganymede ekphrasis (see below). Ripoll (2000) reads all of the Ganymede ekphraseis of Roman epic as celebratory.
26 A poem preserved as part of the Theognidea (Theognis 1345-50), perhaps to be attributed to Euenus of Paros (5th century CE). See Tarán 1979, 9-10.
as a rival for a beautiful youth.27 Roman writers adopted this cliché,28 but adapted it to Roman norms disavowing pederastic relationships with freeborn youths.
Since male slaves were by default sexually available to their masters, and the erotic attractivity of wine servants, usually young boys, was especially pronounced,29 the motif took as its target slave cup-bearers serving at banquets.30 Many of these youths would have been of Greek-Asian origin, and corresponded conveniently to Ganymede, the abducted Phrygian enforced to serve his mighty master. By calling a slave “Ganymede,” Roman poets could elevate the occasion and their own desire to the fantastic sphere of Hellenistic poetry with its associations of education, erotic license and luxury.31 An even more grandiose step was to make a glorifying comparison to the whole divine banquet, with Ganymede-like servants as an eroticizing flavor.32
However, an occasional concern about the age of Ganymede interestingly subverts the normative model of the youth’s erotic objectivation by a phallic writer.
In a rare flip of perspective, Martial (9.36) imagines Ganymede complaining to Jupiter that the first down lies already hidden behind his youthful locks and that Juno calls him a man (vir). He wishes to take the symbolic step to manhood and cut his long hair – just to be torn down by Jupiter wanting to keep him looking young enough for a normatively eroticized cup-bearer.33 This point of view is motivated by Martial’s flattery of the emperor Domitian whose lover Earinus is allowed the haircut. However, a recognition of Ganymede’s apparent physical and psychological maturity pushes Martial to consider him a potentially mature actor. In fact, the common idea in imperial sources seems to be that Ganymede is suspiciously close to being a man, barely hairless enough to pass as the normative sex object.34 Martial
27 Callimachus (A.P. 12.230), Alcaeus of Messene (A.P. 12.64), Dioscorides (A.P. 12.37), Meleager (A.P. 12.65, 68, 70, 101, 133) and anonymous (A.P. 5.167; 12.66, 67, 69). See Tarán 1979, 7-51. For later adaptations of the same motif, see the epigrams by Julius Leonidas and Strato (A.P. 12.20, 194).
28 For Propertius (2.30.23-32) the myth is an example of love’s might justifying the speaker’s own passion for a woman. Horace (carm. 3.20) compares a beautiful youth, courted by both a man and a woman, to Ganymede.
29 In Greek and Etruscan art, wine servants had been represented as beautiful naked youths from Classical times, and Horace (carm. 1.29; sat. 2.8.13-16) takes the ideal of the erotic attractivity of cup-bearing youths as self-evident.
30 The earliest such reference is in Petronius’s Satyrica (92), where a lustful dinner guest praises his host’s waiter as “Ganymede,” but the motif is most prominent in Martial’s poetry (9.103, 10.66, 11.26, 2.43, 9.22, 9.73, 9.25, 10.98,11.22, 11.43, 11.104) appearing in Juvenal (sat. 5) as well.
31 See Vout 2007, 67-68.
32 Cic. nat. deor. 1.112; Elegia in Maecenatem 1. 87-96; Laus Pisonis 152-54; A.P. 12.254. Martial (8.39) and Statius (silv. 1.6.24-50) congratulate Domitian for his fabulous feasts by stating that the cups could be mixed by Ganymede – or an entire troop of Ganymedes.
33 In Petronius’s Satyrica (75.10-11) Trimalchio tells a similar story from his days as his master’s favorite slave. He used to paint his cheeks with lamp oil to enhance the growth of beard and escape his master’s lust, but remained a sex toy for 14 years – far beyond the norm even if he began his career at the age of 11, as suggested by Bielfeldt (2018, 425). See Bielfedt 2018 with further references.
34 Cf. Richlin 2014. See Williams 2010 for the expected hairlessness of sexy youths.
twice compares an envied host’s pretty cup-bearer to Ganymede, “that Trojan cinaedus” (2.43, 10.98), an epithet which marks the youth ironically as a mature and voracious sexual actor, all feminized desire and eagerness to be penetrated (see further, Sections 5.1, 5.2 and 6.3).35 Elsewhere, Martial justifies his own desire for anal sex with the claim that even Jupiter lay with the “full grown” (grandis) Ganymede (11.43).36 The Hadrianic Greek poet Strato argues in turn that boys over twelve become more desirable year after year until the seventeenth year of age is for Zeus – his Ganymede – and those senior for men looking to be penetrated (A.P. 12.4), and that even Zeus has to put up with Ganymede’s beard (A.P. 12.220).
Although these sources never explicitly question Jupiter’s phallic domination of the youth, they draw attention to the norms concerning an eroticized youth’s age and, consequently, his masculinity.
This concern corresponds to our sources about Roman servant boys. There existed a recognized type of slave boy servant, who was “outgrown” in regard to the hairless prettiness usually required from a cup-bearer and the penetrated partner in sex. These youths seem to have been eroticized for their mixture of virility and boyish / feminine qualities, and they were openly paraded as “outgrown” (exoletus), apparently to the effect that their patrons might seem doubly masculine for sexually submitting mature men.37 Scandalizing voices call for compassion for their plight.38 Another gossip-inciting group of servants were youths whose bodily hair was artificially removed in order to keep them in the role of erotic objects and in the boyish task of cup-bearing despite their burgeoned bodies. This youthful disguise raised the suspicion that the servants were no longer penetrated objects, but were, in fact, active masculine penetrators of their depraved patrons.39 Clearly, banquets
35 Interestingly, this allusion seems to have found a visual form in a latrine mosaic recently excavated in Antiochia ad Cragum. See section 2.2.2 below.
36 In 11.22 Martial warns a man against caressing the groin of his “naked Ganymede” during sex in order not to precipitate the boy’s maturity.
37 See Williams 2010, 90-93.
38 Seneca associates this type particularly with banquets and wine-servants. In a letter (epist. 95.24), he pities
“the luckless boys who after dinner have to go through other physical abuses in the cubiculum” and then moves over to the “outgrown” boys (exoleti), “who should all have the same smooth skin, and the same degree of first down upon their cheeks” and a specific hairstyle not to be confused with freeborn youths (see Pollini 2003, 156-57 for the significance of the hairstyle). In On Providence (dial. 1, de providentia 3.13) Seneca speaks of an exoletus cup-bearer forced to remain hanging between sexes and “trained to submit to anything” (omnia pati doctus). See also Mart. 7.62 and the oldest group of boy servants in Philo’s De vita contemplativa 48-52 as interpreted by Pollini 2003, 154-56, and Szesnat 1998.
39 Seneca (epist. 47.7) writes about a wine server, who “must dress like a woman […]; cannot get away from his boyhood; […] and though he has already acquired a soldier’s figure is kept beardless by having his hair smoothed away […], being forced to remain awake throughout the night, dividing his time between his master’s drunkenness and his lust, he must be a man (vir) in the cubiculum, a boy (puer) at the convivium.”
As Williams (2010, 183) notes, the point is aimed at the slave’s master, who is thus established a boy in the cubiculum. Juvenal (11.145-161) sneers suggestively at expensive Phrygian cup-bearers with well-developed genitals and plucked armpits. When a similar malicious comment is posed about Martial’s smooth but suspiciously well-endowed slave boys the poet self-ironically turns the tables by boasting their capability of penetrating the commentator (11.63).
with their atmosphere of pleasure, drunkenness and dim lightning produced a risky environment for erotic desire. False impressions might deceive the desirer – or the ones around judging the acceptability of that desire.40 Euripides’ satyr play Cyclops (573–98) associates this risk with Ganymede. In the play Odysseus is accompanied in the Cyclops’s cave by a group of satyrs. As the Cyclops gets drunk, he starts to see an old and all-over hairy Silenus as his “Ganymede,” whom he then “abducts” against the satyr’s will, obviously for sexual purposes.41
This brief literary review demonstrates that the role of the couple of Jupiter and Ganymede as a symbol for normative erotic relationships between men and the consequent role of Ganymede as a euphemism for sexually available slave boys reflected on the myth the same anxieties that regarded male-to-male eroticism and sex with male slaves in general. These anxieties, in turn, were part of the discourse of male sexual behavior and the general discourse about the correct way of being a man, discussed more thoroughly in chapter 5. It is ironic that the Trojan roots of Ganymede rendered his divine favoritism parallel to the favor received by the heroic ancestors of the Roman people for demonstrating the type of masculine virtuosity that the depraved patrons who took Ganymede’s role in sex with their slaves lacked. This contradiction is discussed in article B in relation to images of the abduction scene.
Roman literature also shows that an artistic image of Ganymede was a particularly potent medium in the discourse of masculinity. Through it, epic writers allude to the heroic heart of Romanness and its complexities: Was the predetermined role of the Trojan-Roman race a curse or a blessing? Was Roman military heroism truly virtuous and at what cost? Comic and satirical writers, in turn, could use the picture of Ganymede as a test revealing of a man’s ability to stick to his normative part when engaging with the desire aroused by the image (see the passages of Plautus, Petronius and Juvenal discussed in articles A and C). This brings us to the actual artistic representations of Ganymede.
2.2 Ganymede in Roman Art
In this section I have two scopes. The first subsection discusses the character of the material I am about to study in this work. It deals with the fact that many of the images we study as part of ancient art history are not strictly speaking ancient, but modern copies. Some images are not preserved in any physical form, but
40 For the erotic but deceptive atmosphere of the banquets, see, e.g., Ov. ars 1.229-253, 3.749-769; Plin. nat.
34.11-13.
41 A possible late allusion to Euripides’ laughs can be found in a banquet scene in Nonnus’s Dionysiaca (19.198–224) where an old drunkard pantomimes Ganymede to win a never-emptying wine bowl.
