introduction
i. masculinity in Imperial Rome
ii. one's sexual behavior as one's essence
iii. the Roman notion of gender
iv. expectations of women
v. conclusion: the empire and the senate 

We have looked so far at the sober and serious side of Imperial history -- the emperor's cult, his charisma, and his massive patronage -- and carefully avoided what actually seems to be of the largest concern to the Romans themselves, namely the emperor's sexual relations. Tacitus really does not look like a proper historian. He starts well enough, focusing on the status of the army and the legal system, but gradually the work seems to focus more and more on sex. Why this is so needs explanation, for it is not a personal quirk: Tacitus is not the only work where politics seems to take a back seat to sex. Sex is a dominant theme in Roman social and political discourse. Compare this painting from a house in Pompeii. [1] The painting has not been preserved particularly well, but it should be clear enough what is going on. A lion is being mounted by an ass, while someone, probably the goddess Victory, crowns the ass with a laurel wreath. What does this unusual menage mean? You may remember from Suetonius' Life of Augustus that before the battle of Actium, the battle in which Augustus defeated Anthony and Cleopatra to take control of the whole of the Roman empire, Augustus is said to have met an ass called Victor (Nicon, in Greek). [2] The lion, however, was the symbol of Anthony, who put it about that he was descended from Hercules. What we have here then, gracing someone's drawing room, is a picture that commemorates Augustus' victory over Anthony. It is certainly vivid, but it seems like a somewhat inappropriate metaphor. What are we to do with all this sex?

To answer this question, what I propose to do today is lay out the conditions of knowledge that shape Tacitus' conception of politics. What I mean by conditions of knowledge is the mentality of the Imperial Period, the frames of reference through which Tacitus and his contemporaries approached and understood events, actions and people. I am interested in one particular frame of reference, the meanings given to sexual acts and sexual behaviors, and this frame of reference is often called a sex/gender system. By examining this system, we will come to understand both the meaning of much of Tacitus' character sketches and the reason why so much of the work is about sex.

But first, I am going to try to unpack the idea of a sex/gender system more fully. Sex is a matter of biology, but biological sex is understood in different ways from culture to culture, and indeed, to make things more complicated, the way biological sex is defined is often itself variable. These different understandings create room for the notion of gender. A gender denotes those characteristics that a particular society associates with a particular sex, the social differences that are piggy-backed onto those anatomical differences considered significant, the characteristics that turn those defined as male into men and those defined as female into women, or which by being absent question a man's masculinity and a woman's femininity. The sex/gender system is that system of beliefs, practices and institutions that affirms the significance of certain anatomical differences and propagates different expectations of what is natural and proper behavior for the groups defined by these anatomical differences. The system is therefore, crucially, culturally relative, and thus a proper object of investigation for a cultural historian.

What then are the characteristics of the Roman sex/gender system in this period? Let us begin with the notion of masculinity first. My evidence will be drawn both from Tacitus himself, who turns out to be a wonderful resource for this mapping project, and from other sources. I should probably attach some sort of warning rating to this lecture, but I shall try to be as delicate as possible within the bounds of clarity.

One of our central requirements for a man to be masculine is that he desire women, not other men. As we saw in Prof Dickson's lecture last semester on pederasty, this was not true for the Greeks -- and it was not true for the Romans either. Roman ideas of masculinity were structured around the notion of dominance and control, control of one's partner and control of oneself. This means, first of all, that the sex of a man's partner is not important; what is of crucial importance is rather how you have sex with your partner. Sex was not a symmetrical action in the classical world: the roles taken in sexual acts were strictly divided along an axis of penetration. One person would do the penetrating, and was considered the dominant partner; the other person, the one penetrated, was the subordinate. That penetration is the good position is clear enough from the wall-painting in Pompeii that we looked at; and we can also compare here an excellent vignette from Tacitus. An ex-consul, Asiaticus, is accused of effeminacy by the notorious accuser Publius Suillius Rufus:

Publius Suillius Rufus accused [Asiaticus] of corrupting the army and using bribes and sexual entanglements to commit the soldiers to unbounded atrocities. Adultery with Poppaea Sabina was a supplementary charge. Another was effeminacy. At this accusation, the prisoner found his voice: "Ask your sons, Suillius," he said. "They will confirm my masculinity." (p. 232)

That Asiaticus is not effeminate is proved by the fact that he has sodomized the accuser's sons.

The dynamics of penetration require further definition. The masculine Roman was oriented towards three orifices: the anus, the vagina, and the mouth. Vagina and anus were roughly equivalent. Indeed it was a commonplace of Imperial proverbial wisdom that what marriage meant for a man was little more than reorientation from a boy's backside to a woman's front; the sexual acts were considered to differ very little in the type of experience. The mouth, however, was more serious. To penetrate someone's mouth was to display more dominance over them, and to offer them a greater humiliation. This is clear from a series of bawdy poems called Songs of Priapus. Priapus, you may know, was the Roman version of the Herm, a statue that stood guard over property, with one particular feature prominent:

If, evil-minded wretch, you have to steal,
Then my huge member up your arse you'll feel;
And if that doesn't make you leave your loot,
Then at a higher place I'll aim to shoot. (Songs of Priapus, no. 28 (tr. W. H. Parker))

Priapus' job is to punish thieves, and this punishment takes the form of rape. As the punishment increases in severity, Priapus moves from anal to oral penetration.

(As an aside we should note one crucial difference in the practice of penetration between the Greeks and Romans. As Prof Dickson described last semester, high-born Greek children were often subject to penetration, and this created something of a crisis of definition for the Greek male: how was someone who had been penetrated as a youth to assume a properly dominant position as an adult? The Romans came up with a simple solution. Penetration of freeborn youths was illegal in normal conditions, so that when Romans practiced penetration of males we are to think mainly of slaves, though also of various criminals, i.e. thieves and adulterers.)

The second aspect of sexual behavior that defined a man's masculinity was how much sex he had. Oddly the right amount was not what we would expect; it was not very much. An aspect of the Asiaticus quotation may have confused you: how is that he can have been charged with both adultery and effeminacy? It would seem that taking other senators' wives would be far from effeminate, but this was not the case. A large sexual appetite, whether directed at men or women or both, was considered effeminate for two reasons. First, it tokened a lack of self-control, an inability to dominate oneself; and second, the Greeks and Romans from their doctors on down thought of sex as weakening the body, and threatening its masculinity through the loss of vital fluids. This second notion is clear in a second Priapus poem:

O citizens, Romans, I pray you please,
There must be a limit -- I'm brought to my knees;
For passionate women from hereabout
Importune me nightly and tire me out...
I used to be hale and lusty and strong,
And able to deal with the thieves that did wrong;
But now I am in a most dangerous state,
And shudder and cough and expectorate. (Songs of Priapus, no. 26 (tr. W. H. Parker))

From having too much sex, Priapus finds himself unable to deal out proper treatment to the thieves; he is no longer able to visibly demonstrate and prove his masculinity.

This notion of sexual appetite has interesting results: an omnivorous sexual drive can render both its subject and its victims effeminate. This is a notion that is evident with both Tiberius and Nero: Nero is certainly effeminate, and Tiberius leans that way, but at the same time Tacitus sees them both as screwing the very city of Rome itself. We will examine Tiberius later.[3]

A third important part of masculinity was not being too emotional; it was particularly important not to be too fond of one's wife. This is Claudius' problem. As you have seen, Claudius' third wife, Messalina, indulges in all sorts of extra-marital goings-on under his very nose. Yet, even when Claudius is offered proof of these adulteries, he finds sympathy for his wife:

For Claudius, home again, soothed and a little fuddled after an early dinner, ordered the 'poor woman" (that is said to have been his phrase) to appear on the next day to defend herself. This was noted. His anger was clearly cooling, his love returning. Further delay risked that the approaching night would revive memories of conjugal pleasures. (250)

This may seem touching to us, but to a Roman it was a disgrace. As Tacitus indignantly reflects, Claudius was "sluggishly uxorious" (246) and "easily controlled by his wives" (252).

This fault in Claudius' character gives the lie to Edward Gibbon's famous claim, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that "of the first fifteen emperors Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct."[4] What Gibbon meant, of course, was that Claudius never had sex with men or boys, but to a Roman this was irrelevant. The fact that he only had sex with women is not enough to make his tastes in love correct; he must also have sex with them in the right way. But as we have seen, Claudius enjoys the sex too much, becomes overly fond of his partners, and so gives them control over him. This may be possible for someone form the eighteenth century to overlook, but it was a big problem for a Roman.

This regime of masculinity, this idea of what makes a man a real man, is obviously different in many ways from our own. But it has been claimed that there are even more significant differences between our understanding of sexual acts and the classical one. I am interested in one claim in particular made by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. Broadly, this claim is that, prior to the nineteenth century, a man's sexual acts did not define who he was, did not issue from his interior essence, and did not permeate every aspect of his behavior and appearance. We are very familiar with the idea that one's sexual acts indicate a sexuality, an aspect of one's identity. What kind of sex we are interested in (basically categorized according to the sex of our partners), defines much more about us than who we sleep with; it says something about what sort of a person you are, homosexual or heterosexual -- a difference as important as whether you are male or female, communist or capitalist, religious or atheist, black or white. We are all familiar with the stereotypical gay man: what makes him gay is not simply that he sleeps with another man, but rather that he walks in certain ways, talks in certain ways, holds his body in certain ways, and dresses in certain ways. His gayness is visible in everything he does.

Foucault argues that such a transformation of a sexual act (having sex with someone) into a sexuality, the essence of your character, was not a feature of the classical world:

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them [i.e. the person responsible for them in court]. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood... Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidiously and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. ...Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transformed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (Foucault, History of Sexuality, p.43 (tr. R. Hurley))

Foucault does a wonderful job here of bringing out what sexual acts mean to us, but I want to argue that his historical claims about the classical world are surely wrong. In fact, what I want to do is locate Foucault's idea of sexuality (which he restricts to the last couple of centuries) in Imperial Rome. It is precisely the fact that sexual acts were connected to everything in a person's composition that underlies Tacitus' interest in the sex lives of his characters. It may not have been who you had sex with that defined who you were (as it was for Gibbon), but certainly how you had sex, and how many times you had sex, did.

Let me illustrate this through the example of rhetoric. For the Romans the way you spoke directly reflected on your masculinity and thus indicated what you did in the bedroom. A loose, fluid and elaborate oratorical style illustrated an effeminate looseness in the rest of one's dealings. We may compare here an anecdote recorded by Aulus Gellius, a learned second century Roman who collected lots of trivia about famous people:

It is said that Demosthenes [the Greek orator] in his dress and the rest of his care for his body was splendid, attractive and too polished. And so these "refinements" gave rise to insults from his rivals and adversaries as "dainty little cloaklets" and "soft little frocks." Nor was he spared foul and unworthy names; indeed he was even called too little a man and "of polluted mouth." (Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 1.5 (tr. E. Gunderson))

"Of polluted mouth" is particularly significant. We have already noted that oral penetration is more humiliating than anal penetration; this is what is being alluded to here. Genitals were considered filthy, and thus genital contact of any sort tainted the mouth. Demosthenes' speech is thus figured not only as a sign of his effeminacy, but more basically as a sign that that he is subject to oral penetration.

The accusation of a polluted mouth is common in Tacitus,[5] but there is something else of interest in the passage about Demosthenes. Demosthenes' effeminacy is reflected not only in his oratory, but also in his dress and the care of his body, that is things like his hair, his personal cleanliness. These aspects of his lifestyle form a seamless continuum with his oratory, with both indicative of his gender. This points to the fact that the Romans saw one's choice of sexual act as just one among many related symptoms, including dress, speech and haircut, of one's essential inner gender, in Demosthenes' case, of his "interior androgyny." In fact, handbooks were produced that helped one recognize an effeminate from his gestures, and conversely recognize the real men among the males -- this whole industry confirms the notion that a man had an essential gender which was, as Foucault puts it, "at the root of all his actions" and "written immodestly on his face and body."

Several of these handbooks, by Greeks and Romans, survive from this period; this passage is from one by a Greek called Polemo from the second century. His book was called Physiognomy, and physiognomy is the art of judging character from facial or other external characteristics. Polemo says that you can spot someone who is really feminine

by his provocatively melting glance and by the rapid movement of his intensely staring eyes. His brow is furrowed, while his eyebrows and cheeks are in constant motion. His head is tilted to the side, his loins do not hold still, and his slack limbs never stay in one position. He minces along with little jumping steps; his knees knock together. He carries his hands with palms turned upward. He has a shifting gaze, and his voice is thin, weepy, shrill and drawling. (Polemo, Physiognomy (Gleason, p.395))

Men may try to cover up their essential femininity, so vigilance is required. In fact this is really the point of these handbooks, to allow you to translate the smallest slips in a public facade into conclusions about a man's essential gender. A physiognomy written in Latin by an unknown author offers this guidance for the aspiring gender policeman:

For it is by the twitching of their lips and the rotation of their eyes, by the haphazard and inconsistent shifting of their feet, by the movement of their hips and the fickle motion of their hands, and by the tremor of their voice as it begins to speak, that effeminates are most easily revealed. (Anon. Latin Physiognomy (Gleason, p.408))

The effeminate man is thus a total personage. Everything he does reflects on some deeper level, despite his best efforts, his interior gendered self. And that self is entirely permeable: in sex he is penetrated, in oratory he does not have control over his mouth, and in his gait his limbs are as loose as his orifices. There is a complete homology between his actions in the sexual and the political, legal and social spheres.

This is why Foucault's historical claims are wrong. Anal penetration certainly did not make you effeminate in essence (as long as you were doing the penetrating), but other forms of sexual act did. Sex is not some separate sphere; rather it illuminates, confirms and determines a man's political and social actions. A dominant man in the bedroom is a dominant man in government or advocacy. For the Romans there was a complete continuity, a complete homology between the sexual and the political. The two were mutually defining.

Let me offer some examples from Tacitus. My favorite is the one alluded to in my title, Suillius Caesoninus. This individual shared in the orgies accompanying Messalina's bigamous second marriage to Gaius Silius. Eventually, Claudius has almost everyone killed:

The execution of accomplices was ordered: Titius Proculus -- appointed Messalina's guard by Silius -- Vettius Valens, who confessed, and two further members of the order of knights, Pompeius Urbicus and Saufeius Trogus. The same penalty was visited on the commander of the watch, Decrius Calpurnianus, the superintendent of a gladiator's school, Sulpicius Rufus, and a junior senator, Juncus Vergilianus. ...Plautius Lateranus escaped the death sentence owing to an uncle's distinguished record. So did Suillius Caesoninus, because of his own vices -- at that repulsive gathering, his had been merely a female part. (249-50)

Why does Caesoninus escape? Because he is effeminate, and effeminate by nature. This effeminacy infects his whole mode of action. There is simply no way that a man whose only sexual acts are to be penetrated could ever be a political threat.

Claudius too is interesting. We have already seen that Tacitus criticizes him for uxoriousness, for being over fond of his wives. But this is for Tacitus simply another sign of his weak government: effeminate in his loving, in government he is controlled by a mixture of women and freedmen, ex-slaves from effeminate provinces such as Greece -- a fact that makes the man they dominate doubly or triply effeminate.

Tiberius' faults according to Tacitus are his autocracy, his cruelty and his malevolence (202), but these are precisely the characteristics of his sexual life that Tacitus offers:

His criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types of perversion were invented. Slaves were charged to locate and procure his requirements. The y rewarded compliance, overbore reluctance with menaces, and -- if resisted by parents or relations -- kidnapped their victims, and violated them on their own account. It was like the sack of a captured city. (200)

Tiberius is a cruel and evil sexual tyrant. This description of his perversions is tame compared to that in Suetonius, however (Tib. 43-45), but I will spare you the details. There are several copies in the library for those who are interested. But this description deserves closer study, for Tiberius is that fascinating point where effeminacy and hypermasculinity meet. His sexual appetite makes women of all those around him. Quite contrary to Roman law he penetrates the free-born; and, even worse, his agents, who are slaves, also end up penetrating those free-born who try to defend their bodies, so that not only are the free-born penetrated, but their social status is doubly inverted. Tacitus describes this as the sack of the whole city, a clear metaphor for its feminization. (We may note here that the sack of city was seen in very obviously sexual terms: the stones slung by catapults were called "penises" and often had phalluses inscribed on them.) Tiberius is a tyrant, but he is also an oriental tyrant who cannot control his lusts, and thus in some way effeminate also. This aspect is brought out more strongly in Suetonius' portrait, which insists that Tiberius was especially voyeuristic, preferring often to watch rather than to take part.

Tacitus, in fact, comes close to making explicit the connection between the sexual and the political in a brief reference to Plato's Republic two pages further on:

How truly the wisest of men used to assert that the souls of despots, if revealed, would show wounds and mutilations -- weals left on the spirit, like lash-marks on a body, by cruelty, lust and malevolence. Neither Tiberius' autocracy nor isolation could save him from confessing the internal torments which were his retribution. (202-203)

Cruelty, lust and malevolence are an excellent Tacitean trio. Each would be hard to conceive without the other, for, for Tacitus, the essential character of Tiberius showed itself in both his private and public dealings.

I could offer more examples, but I have mapped out the cultural grids on which Tacitus plots his characters, particularly the way in which he connects the sexual and the political, and this can be used to evaluate the sexualities and politics of some other figures such as Sejanus, Nero and Germanicus. But there are two further points I want to make (Roman numerals iii and iv in the summary.)

First, I want to draw some general conclusions about the Roman notion of gender, because I think it is different from ours in an important way: it is much less anchored to anatomical differences. That is, there is much less of an expectation that boys will be boys, and girls can't be boys. Men could easily be feminine (it was not just a few odd men out), and women could be masculine. Early in his handbook, Polemo makes this very clear:

In the masculine there is something feminine to be found, and in the feminine something masculine, but the name "masculine" or "feminine" is assigned according to which of the two prevails. (Polemo, Physiognomy (Gleason, p.390))

You might want to think about whether this is equally true for us today, but in ancient Rome this belief created a fantastic anxiety concerning a man's masculinity. Masculinity was not exactly expected, though it was very much desired. As Maud Gleason puts it, "Masculinity in the ancient world was an achieved state, radically underdetermined by anatomical sex" (391).

This anxiety surfaces not only in the handbook industry, with its tips on spotting those men who pretend to be masculine, but are really feminine, but also in the teaching of oratory (the books written in great quantities by people like Quintilian). Aspiring orators were taught how to stand, how to gesture, what tone their voices should have. Masculinity may have been an essence, but that did not stop the Romans doing their best to teach it to their children.

Anxiety focused also on the parents, particularly the mothers, of young and future Romans. We can see this in the senate's punishment of a mother who was deemed too indulgent, and indeed in the fact that Tacitus deems this significant enough to record:

At this time, too, Sextus Papinius -- son of a man who had been consul -- hurled himself headlong to a sudden and undignified death. The blame fell on his mother. Long divorced, she had indulged his extravagances to a point at which death was his only escape. Charged in the senate, she prostrated herself before the senators and made a long and piteous appeal, pleading especially the anguish which anybody, particularly a weak woman, must feel at a bereavement such as hers. However, she was banned from Rome for ten years, until her younger son had passed the dangerous years of youth. (225)

The theme of the bad mother is one that is prominent with Tiberius and Nero, and what lies behind it is the intense Roman concern for masculinity. How far a mother should indulge her son was a tricky problem, then as now -- but then the stakes were, I think, much higher. This was, as we have seen, a face-to-face, public and highly competitive culture. Moreover, as Garnsey and Saller showed, those men whom we would consider fully adult, were still very much under the thumb of their fathers, unable to borrow money without their permission, and even technically owing their lives to their whim. The term young man could be used of a man up until he was forty. In these circumstances, proving one's masculinity could certainly have been a trial.[6]

My fourth and final task is to elucidate what expectations were laid on women. As we have seen from Polemo, women could be masculine. We can add that they were in fact expected to be so. Unfortunately for women, though, their bodies lay in the way of this goal. Their bodies were perceived as spongy and particularly likely to retain the fluids that in large doses will cause hysteria. A statue taken from the tomb of a famous Roman family, and now to be found in the Vatican, illustrates this well. It is made of marble and a little smaller than life size. The statue was free-standing, and could be viewed from all sides, though, being in a tomb, this was not a regular, nor public occurrence. The support that enables the statue to be free-standing is decorated with a dolphin, one of the symbols of Venus, and a traditional gesture of affection from the widowed husband.

This is a striking statue, and a good reminder that Roman statuary was not simply mimetic, that is, it did not simply represent appearances. For there is something deeply wrong with this statue if we try to read it that way: the body does not fit the head. The body is full and fleshy, the body of a younger woman, while the head is stern and even severe; the skin is taught and wrinkled. What has happened is that the dead woman's head has been imposed on a Venus body.

An odd thing to do, you might think, but actually relatively well attested (there is a second statue that survives, and several references to the practice in literature). In fact, this statue sums up the Roman idea of a good woman: a potentially out-of-control Venus body governed by a masculine head. The more masculine the government, the better the wife: loyal, efficient, supportive of her husband's ambitions, self-sacrificing, and good at managing business affairs. This has the slightly odd result (to us) that masculine wives were the most desirable. We can almost plot the various women in Tacitus along the scale of this body: the more body, the nearer the toes; the more masculinity, the nearer the head. I will look at two examples, Messalina and the elder Agrippina.

Messalina is straightforward: too much body, too much woman. She simply has no head. She acts on the basis of desire only, searching, as Tacitus comments, for "the sensualist's ultimate satisfaction" (245), without any sense of decorum or any self-control. Tacitus compares her to a Bacchant (247), a simile we have seen used of Dido in the Aeneid. Her death is illustrative of her nature and its failings:

[Her mother, Domitia Lepida] urged Messalina to await the executioner. "Your life is finished," she said. "All that remains is to make a decent end." But in that lust-ridden heart decency did not exist. Messalina was still uselessly weeping and moaning when the men violently broke down the door. ...Then for the first time it dawned on Messalina what her position really was. Terrified she took a dagger, and put it to her throat and then her breast -- but could not do it. And so [an] officer ran her through. (250)

Compare Agrippina. She is very much at the head end of the statue. Her behavior after the death of her husband Germanicus is impeccable -- her dignified and decorous mourning -- but she turns out to be too masculine. And this is the paradox of women's gendering in ancient Rome. They were expected to be masculine, but not too much. A woman was thus caught in a double bind: she was either too womanish, or too mannish. After her death Tacitus describes her thus:

Actually, Agrippina knew no feminine weaknesses. Intolerant of rivalry, thirsting for power, she had a man's preoccupations. (p.212)

It is this masculine strength and impermeability that troubles Tiberius. It is illustrative that when Agrippina's son, Nero Caesar, is accused of being sexually penetrated, she is accused not of indecency, but of insubordination:

The youth [Nero Caesar] was accused not of actual or intended rebellion but of homosexual indecency. Against his daughter-in-law Tiberius dared not invent similar charges, but attacked her insubordinate language and disobedient spirit. (p.196)

Given this, Agrippina's decision to ask Tiberius for another husband is a fascinating ploy. Agrippina has been playing the game of politics almost as a man, but at this moment she plays her trump card, her body. By asking for marriage, Agrippina is declaring that she is not too masculine, that she does not seek to rule, either in a household or in the empire; but this body can be used to create new relations and to threaten Tiberius even more than it did when it was denied, and so Tiberius reacts by entrenching her hypermasculine celibacy:

Agrippina, resentful as ever, became physically ill. When Tiberius visited her, at first she wept long and silently. Then she broke into embittered appeals. "I am lonely," she said. Help me and give me a husband! I am still young enough, and marriage is the only respectable consolation. Rome contains men who would welcome Germanicus' wife and children." Tiberius recognized the political implications of this -- but did not want to show either anger or fear. So her persistence remained unanswered. (p.184)

Yet, when she is dead, Tiberius does exactly the opposite, attempting to smear her with charges of adultery and thus to reattach her to an irrational desiring body and fit her back in to the more normal range of women:

From Tiberius came an outburst of filthy slanders, accusing her of adultery with Gaius Asinius Gallus, and asserting that she had wearied of living when Asinius died. (p.212)

There are many fascinating female figures in Tacitus, particularly Livia, Tiberius' mother and Augustus' wife, and the second Agrippina whose problematic gender-bending rivals and even surpasses that of her mother. But that is a treat coming up in the next section of the reading.

What I have sought to do in this lecture is to describe the conditions of knowledge in which Tacitus conceives of and writes about politics. I have described the expectations that surround the behavior of men and women, the insecurities attached to masculinity, and the paradoxical nature of the expectations laid on women. Understanding the sex/gender system of imperial Rome allows one to examine the significance of the various events and characters that Tacitus offers us, the emperors, the wives, the senators and the less elevated. But it also allows us to see why Tacitus is interested in the sexual behavior of his characters. For the Romans, sexual behavior issued directly from the essence of a character, and this essence determined your rule as much as your oratory and your dress. What you did in the bedroom was what you did in politics: Claudius was weak in government and sex, Agrippina's masculine celibacy was a sign of her political threat to Tiberius.

I want to conclude with three further observations. First, one thing I have not talked about at all today is foreign affairs, that is the relations of Rome with sovereign states, not the relations of the emperors with foreign women (though we have seen the congruence of the two in Vergil's Dido). Tacitus constantly switches back and forth between Rome and its borders, whether in Germany or in Parthia and Armenia, with little concern for anything in between (Northern Italy, Sardinia, Greece etc). Why such concern with the borders? As we have seen one of the basic metaphors for dominance in a man is impermeability, resistance to penetration by others; Tacitus naturally conceives of the Roman empire in the same terms: the empire can only be strong if it is not permeable, and thus the borders of the empire become the locus of its symbolic definition. Like a Roman man, the empire is continually subject to attack, and continually in need of vigilance to prevent its penetration. The basic idea that makes the borders so important is not, I would argue, any real threat to the stability of the empire, but the conception of the empire in terms of the Roman notion of masculinity.

Second, the senatorial class, in Tacitus' vision, is also conceived of in the same terms, but this is a body that has been disastrously ruptured, and worst of all, and most paradoxically, ruptured by a series of women (Livia and the younger Agrippina) and lower class men (Sejanus, Narcissus and Pallas). Tacitus' obsession is the senate's integrity -- integrity in its full etymological sense, where it also refers to wholeness or a state of not having been penetrated. His answer cannot have helped his sense of his own masculinity as a senator: he offers a middle path between the polluted mouth of flattery and false accusations and the literal bodily rupture of being murdered or committing suicide. Marcus Lepidus is one who found this middle path:

I find that this Marcus Lepidus played a wise and noble part in events. He often palliated the brutalities caused by other people's sycophancy. And he had a sense of proportion -- for he enjoyed unbroken influence and favour with Tiberius. This compels me to doubt whether, like other things, the friendships and enmities of rulers depend on destiny and the luck of a man's birth. Instead may our own decisions play some part, enabling us to steer a way, safe from intrigues and hazards, between perilous insubordination and degrading servility? (167)

Sycophancy, insubordination, and degrading civility -- the underlying metaphors of masculinity and effeminacy should be clear here.

Lastly, take a look at this picture. It was produced in Time magazine about a year ago, and I thought it would be out of date by now, but it still seems very current. You will all recognize the statue and recognize too the attempt to compare the relation between sex and politics in our age with that in the age of the Caesars. Just around this time, an Italian paper, the Corriere della Sera, suggested that President Clinton's dominant sexual acts would have been a source of national prestige if he had been a Caesar. This is the final entry on your handout, no. 21:

Corriere della Sera said that Caesar's subjects were not scandalized by his peccadilloes, but saw them as "a source of national pride". What really mattered -- as with Mr Clinton -- were his political abilities and achievements. (London Times, 2/6/98)

There is, I think, some truth and some falsehood here, but you should now be in a position where you can assess the validity of this newspaper's claims and examine the differences between our own sex/gender system and that of the Imperial Romans.

Bibliography

Barbara Kellum, "Phallus as Signifier," Sexuality in Ancient Art, ed N. Kampen (Cambridge, 1996), 170-83

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (Pantheon, 1978)

Eve D'Ambra, "Calculus of Venus: Nude Portraits of Roman Women," Sexuality in Ancient Art, ed N. Kampen (Cambridge, 1996), 219-32

Maud Gleason, "Semiotics of Gender," Before Sexuality, ed J. Winkler et al. (Princeton, 1990), 389-415

Ramsey Macmullen, "Roman Attitudes to Greek Love," Historia 31 (1982), 484-502

Amy Richlin, "Not Before Homosexuality," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993): 523-73

Aline Rousselle, "Body Politics in Ancient Rome," History of Women in the West, ed Pauline Schmitt Pantel (Harvard, 1992), 324-336