Download PDF | (Routledge Research in Byzantine Studies) Mark Masterson - Between Byzantine Men_ Desire, Homosociality, and Brotherhood in the Medieval Empire-Taylor & Francis (2022).
231 Pages
Between Byzantine Men
The presence and importance of same-sex desire between men in the Byzantine Empire has been understudied. While John Boswell and others tried to open a conversation about desire between Byzantine men decades ago, the field reverted to emphasis on prohibition and an inability to read the evidence of same-sex desire between men in the sources. Between Byzantine Men: Desire, Homosociality, and Brotherhood in the Medieval Empire challenges and transforms this situation by placing at center stage Byzantine men’s desiring relations with one another.
This book foregrounds desire between men in and around the imperial court of the 900s. Analysis of Greek sources (many untranslated until now) and of material culture reveals a situation both more liberal than the medieval West and important for its rite of brother-making (adelphopoiesis), which was a precursor to today’s same-sex marriage. This book transforms our understanding of Byzantine elite men’s culture and is an important addition to the history of sex and desire between men.
Between Byzantine Men will appeal to scholars and general readers who are interested in Byzantine History, Society, and Culture, the History of Masculinity, and the History of Sexuality.
Mark Masterson is Associate Professor of Classics at Te Herenga Waka/ Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality and Authority in Late-Roman Manhood (2014), as well as a number of articles and book chapters on sexuality and masculinity. He is also one of editors of the collection, Sex in Antiquity. Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World (2015).
A Note on Transliteration of Greek (and Related Matters)
As I most often have the words in Greek nearby that I am converting into the Latin alphabet, I have decided that it is unnecessary to use macrons and other such things, unless I am quoting someone’s scholarship that is using them. This means, to take some examples, that an o in the Latin script can be omicron or omega, and ane can be either epsilon or eta. How this works will be clear enough and any confusion can be cleared up by the Greek that is almost invariably nearby.
If Iam quoting a noun or adjective or a verb in isolation, the reader may anticipate that I am using the Nominative singular for the noun, the Nominative singular masculine for the adjective, and the first person singular present indicative for the verb. When I am quoting directly from a passage, I will quote/transliterate the form that appears there. Words will sometimes look different, as Greek is inflected.
Sometimes I use English translations of the names of works, e.g., On Imperial Reigns, while at other times the Latin titles, e.g., Theophanes Continuatus. | would be grateful for patience as the field as a whole has many customs and one ends up following the practice of the people whom one reads. A perfect solution here is elusive.
Lastly, if a name is common enough in English usage, e.g., Constantine or Basil, I have used the anglicization. If it is uncommon, then I have transliterated the Greek (and I tend to avoid Latinization of names). An exception: I opted to keep Paulos (and not Paul) as Nikephoros’ correspondent because the Apostle Paul figures in comments that concern Paulos and Nikephoros. It seemed much easier that way. In any case: again a perfect solution is not to be found.
A Note on the End Notes
Notes are included in this book to provide references or add supplemental material of various kinds, e.g., the Greek texts, additional explanations, expansions. While the notes are not irrelevant, the argument of the book proceeds independently of them and curiosity is the reason to consult them.
Introduction
Prelude: Letter 44 of Nikephoros Ouranos
This account of desire and sociability between men in the Byzantine Empire in the tenth and early eleventh centuries commences with a letter written circa 1000 by Nikephoros Ouranos: Letter 44. Nikephoros was a writer! and noted political figure in the long reign (976-1025) of Emperor Basil II. His career was spectacular.” After holding a number of offices, military, civil, and even lay religious, he was doux (military commander) of Antioch and “Master of the East,” a to that time unparalleled title, in the first decade of the eleventh century.
Nikephoros held the highest degree of trust of the gloomy and untrusting Emperor Basil II.> Nikephoros apparently also was a eunuch.° Letter 44 is one of five letters that Nikephoros wrote to Paulos Krites.’ Paulos was krites (“judge”) of the Hippodrome and the Armeniak theme,® and the testimony of a lead seal shows he was protospatharios (a dignity in the imperial hierarchy)? and kourator (administrator of imperial holdings) in addition.!° Both of these men existed within close proximity to the emperor. Note the presence of desire in this communication from one man to another at a pinnacle of Byzantine society:
To Paulos Krites:
If you practice silence until now, schooling (paideuon/nawev@v) or testing me, let it be enough for you of school (paideias/nadeiac) and test, whether I am liable to charges of many great faults against you, or even that no time before this moment has brought you satisfaction where I am concerned. Look, while being schooled (paideuomenoi/noidev6pEvor) and not being worthy of a word from you, do I stop asking you about your affairs and worrying about them, or do I give in and get in there to dare to write first, so that, whether blamed on account of daring or accepted on account of affection, I may in any case get writing or a word (from you), whether longed for by me and lovable or even threatening and scolding? For this voice (of yours) is longed for by me, just as assaults and blows are by lovers (erosi/ép@ov) from their beloveds (eromenonlépwmpévov).
Or just as the river’s flow is by those who thirst, the flow that is, on the one hand, fearful, huge, and threatening to sweep away the one who approaches, but, nevertheless, is clear, cool, and sweetest. Therefore let it be thus for me, whether you praise me, accuse me, or take hands to me to treat me roughly, only may you write, providing things pleasant and sufficient to comfort me, and may you have your fill of game-playing (paidias/no1siac) or school (paideias/nodeiac). (Nikephoros Ouranos, Letter 44)!
Wanting a letter from Paulos, Nikephoros depicts the epistolary silence he endures as punishment.!? And, it’s not fair, as he cares about Paulos’ affairs. In any case, like a needy boyfriend who texts too much, he persists in writing, hoping for attention and abasing himself. Any word, even if it’s negative, will do, for it would at least be attention. Referring to eromenoi/ éEp@pevot (boy beloveds, known from classical Greece) and their lovers (erontes/ép@vtéec), which is a synonym for the better known erastai/épaotat, Nikephoros casts himself as the poorly treated lover to Paulos’ physically abusive beloved. Nikephoros also compares Paulos to an enticing, yet perilous river. The letter concludes with a plea, again, for attention of any kind and for an end to the games and hard-hearted schooling Paulos puts Nikephoros through.
Desire is present in a number of ways in this letter. Eromenoi and erontes have already been noted. Both of these words call to mind the prominent Greek word for sexual desire: eros/épmc. There are mentions of affection (philtron/piatpov), and a voice that’s longed for (potheines/no8ew7j\c) and desired (eperastou/énepaotov), the latter again related to eros. Another set of words, those for school(ing) (paideia/naeia), to school (paideuo/naidsevo), and game-playing (paidia/na161d), all have a discernible relation to the word pais (naic). Pais means boy, and it is a word sexualized in the context of this letter, since it is a pais who can be an eromenos, and therefore an object of sexual desire.
But it is not just the sexy and desirous vocabulary, recognizable to men of this educated milieu, that foregrounds same-sex desire in these words from one man to another, the dangerous and yet beautiful river that appears toward the end of the letter does so also:
...this voice (of yours) is longed for by me, just as assaults and blows are by lovers from their beloveds. Or just as the river’s flow is by those who thirst, the flow that is, on the one hand, fearful, huge, and threatening to sweep away the one who approaches, but, nevertheless, is clear, cool, and sweetest.
That desired voice, whose effect Nikephoros compares to the impacts that can characterize raucous relations between beloveds and lovers, is like a physically imposing river that promises peril, while also being beautiful and welcoming. And as the sexy vocabulary noted above calls carnal things to the minds of educated writers and readers, Nikephoros’ metaphorical great river does the same via intertextuality.”
Since this river is a great channel of water that both causes awe and yet attracts in the context of same-sex desire, it recalls and is intertextual with the famous sea of beauty from Plato’s Symposium, a work known to the men of this milieu. In her description of the ladder of love, Diotima tells how the lover, who proceeds in the correct way, moves from desire for individual bodies to the more abstract beauties of institutions and eventually receives a transcendent vision of singular beauty. Diotima uses the metaphor of a “mighty sea”:
And [the idealized lover] looking now to mighty beauty and no longer like a slave, low and of little account, being servile and loving the beauty in one thing—the beauty of a boy or some man, or a particular institution—but turned to and gazing upon the mighty sea of beauty, he brings to birth the beautiful and magnificent words and conceptions in plentiful philosophy, until strengthened and made greater, he should thereupon gaze on a single beauty...
(Plato, Symposium 210D)!*
This moment of intertextuality with a well-known passage in the celebrated Symposium naturally comes to mind, as Letter 44 has a number of the same things on its mind: same-sex desire, physicality, a great body of water. A reader of this passage from Plato may balk a little at this idealization from Golden-Age Greece. After all, the progress to the single abstract beauty is not an easy one as it commences with a physical lure: a boy or man. Is transcending equilibrium possible, if we are still on earth amid handsome bodies? Knowledge of this intertext suggests that Nikephoros, who speaks of assaults and rough handling, has not risen above this earthly plane. Still, a sea is not a river, and Nikephoros failing while Diotima limns a possible path to sublimation puts space between letter and Platonic dialogue. But the glamour of the Symposium means it is always a likely intertext and meaning happens, as here, through the later text diverging from the earlier. But the Symposium need not be the only intertext. It may be sharing the stage.
For example, in the tenth of Philostratus the Elder’s Letters (third century CE), the narrator addresses a younger male beloved, who in the passage appears as a fetching shepherd, seems born of the sea like Aphrodite, and surpasses flowers in a meadow. Finally, when the narrator comes to a river, he thinks of the young man as an elementally beautiful river that surpasses the sea:
If I come [to you] as some traveler on the road, you seem to me to mind your flock and sit, while charming the rocks. Andif I come to the sea, the sea produces you, just as the deep did Aphrodite. And if to a meadow, you surpass the flowers themselves, although no such thing grows there, for if they are beautiful and graceful elsewise, they are but of one day.
And indeed, while being near a river, I do not know how it has vanished, but I form a mental image of you flowing beautiful (Aalon/Kadov), great, and much greater than the sea.
(Philostratus the Elder, Letter 10)!°
If anything, this is closer to the Nikephoros’ letter than the glamorous Plato. In both Philostratus and Nikephoros desire, a river, and overwhelming feelings that threaten to swamp an attracted narrator appear, and both are letters too.!®
In summation, Letter 44 not only portrays the feelings Nikephoros has with words of same-sex desire, e.g., words related to eros, pais, and the others of affection and desire, it also calls the things of desire to mind through imagery to be found in earlier texts that are also concerned with same-sex desire. Indeed, Letter 44’s depictions of mental erotic obsession and (even violent) carnality bulk larger in the reader’s perception in proportion to the level of the reader’s education. The letter wears its connection to high levels of education on its sleeve, as it were: it tropes incessantly on paideia (school, education); the Greek is elevated; the language looks back to golden-age Greece; the imagery is extravagant and literary. It encourages the educated mind to ponder, discover, and admire. Letter 44 documents a connection between these two men and suggests ways for Paulos (and us now) to envision Paulos’ connection to Nikephoros.
What This Book Does and How It Does It
Documentation of same-sex desire in history is an important activity and is what is owed to truth. The foregoing analysis of Letter 44 that centered desire was true to this goal. The analysis paid attention both to the surface of the letter and to things that may have come to mind on the basis of competencies Byzantine writers and readers possessed, and the result was a reparative reading of the letter. Reparative readings of historical sources favor happy affect and envision, speculatively, wholes from parts. These readings are also attuned to contingency and the unexpected. Regulation and disapproval are not as much a consideration (though they will receive attention) as bodily life and the desires and fantasies that attend it. In other words, teleological narratives that harmonize everything under the watchful eyes of canon and civil law and the diffuse ideals of behavior proper to men or andres are not what the reader will find in this book. Rather there will be reparative narratives of individual contexts that are askew to broader prospects and which even run athwart them. But this is not a bad thing, as it is clear from the source material that Byzantium was a place of multiple discourses.!”
Discussions to come are predicated on four assumptions about the evidence. The first and second assumptions are that the men spoken of in this book possessed high degrees of education or paideia and that intertextuality in the written records to be discussed is therefore interpretable. In terms of paideia, these were men who knew the New Testament and the Septuagint!
well. They also knew the Greek classics, frequently better than scholars do now and bodies of work from late antiquity by writers such as Gregory Nazianzenus or Gregory of Nyssa.!? The assumption about paideia naturally supports the assumption about intertextuality. Intertextual analysis assumes that quotation or reference to an earlier text, Christian or pagan, was recognizable and interpretable. This meant that when these men were communicating with one another via a text that alluded to an earlier text or texts, there is reason to believe that the reader would have awareness of what was said in the earlier text and how it compared to the situation in the later text. Intertextuality is a common feature of Byzantine texts,2° and is discernable in many of the texts appearing in this book. The comparison between these texts in the reader’s mind provides semantic depth and an additional way to make meaning then and now. While it is speculative to a degree, and calls to mind things not visible, i.e., actions “off-stage” and desires/thoughts/fantasies, interpretation of intertextuality is both a resource to the scholar now and is true to the mode of communication of the men of this educated milieu. Analysis of intertextuality mirrors what happened in the tenth and early eleventh centuries.”!
The third assumption is that texts don’t just reflect reality, they also help make it. Letters and histories that have same-sex desire and intimations of same-sex relations in them, don’t just tell what was being thought of, they would have provoked such things. The textual and occasional material evidence” in this book are viewed from the angle that they both reflected and created the realities in which they played a part.”
The fourth assumption is that same-sex desire and same-sex sexual behavior have no necessary character, i.e., are indeterminate, or, alternatively, possess indeterminacy. This means that they have discernable existence prior to any judgment of their significance or morality; they exist and acquire meaning only in context. This assumption is difficult to hold on to, as it demands analytical distance on things (desire, sexual behavior) that often attract judgment in the sources. But measured appraisal of the Byzantine evidence shows that same-sex desire and intimations of sexual behavior are to be seen in the sources with happy affect associated with them, even as civil law and church canon forbid the behavior. This divergence of views on desire and sexual behavior points to their nature as prior to judgment and to their indeterminacy, for they are associated not only with sin and illegality, but also with pleasure, friendship, brotherhood, and religion. An important corollary to this non-necessary, indeterminate character is that reparative narratives free of the need to genuflect to teleologies of civil law or ecclesiastical stricture can be written. While prohibition and censure are certainly to be found in the sources, not all narratives need to end in the semantic closure of prohibition.”4
A Christian Empire
This book at times sets aside church teachings on same-sex desire and sexual behavior because differing valuations of sex present in the sources show that it was indeterminate, i.e., sex and desire were perceptibly prior to moral judgment and possessed no necessary meaning or significance. However, because Byzantium was an assertively Christian state, it will not do to move blithely from this phenomenological fact to reparative narration of this counter-discourse that views matters of desire and sex differently. There is need to pause and work through how these two discourses, one offering a negative valuation and the other a positive one, coexisted in devout Byzantium. Respect for what was true of many Byzantine persons’ lives and for decades of scholarship that mostly has centered prohibition demands this.”° In the end, the position of this book is that while there was a dominant negative discourse with civil and ecclesiastical power behind it, it shared the stage with another perspective. Indeed, as will be seen in the third chapter, an elaborate prayer for brotherhood is arguably intertextual with the language of same-sex desire seen in epistolography and historiography from court circles. And in the fourth chapter, a reparative presentation of contemporary thoughts about the bachelorhood of Emperor Basil II showcases the surprising role that same-sex desire plays in the formation of properly religious masculinity in Symeon the New Theologian’s directions to his monks.*° But at this moment, it is time for another letter of Nikephoros Ouranos. This letter shows the coexistence of devotion to the church with both practices of desire and intimations of physical activities at odds with this devotion.
Letter 26 of Nikephoros Ouranos
Nikephoros wrote Letter 26, like Letter 44, probably in the first decade 1000s.7’ The addressee is Nicholas, Metropolitan of Neokaisareia in Pontus, who was likely somewhat younger than Nikephoros7®:
To Nicholas, Metropolitan of Neokaisareia:
As much as I am frozen, my dear soul, by this bitterness of winter as I go about my daily business, to that extent do I every time bloom/sprout/ bud (thallomen/06Ad0p1€v) with the hopes that the sweet spring of friendship, which straight up is time spent with you, already smiles upon me. Bloom/sprout/bud (thalle/0dAX€), therefore, for me, for the visit of your friend abandoning each sorrowful thing (if there are any), and anything autumnal or wintry. Let us, each other, together spend a spring prior to the season with our unifying God.
(Nikephoros Ouranos, Letter 26)?
In this warm letter written in a cold time, Nikephoros cheers himself with hopes of being with his friend Nicholas again. The calendar’s progress promises eventual change to this situation, and Nikephoros, a flower in bud, has sprouted in anticipation. Portraying their friendship as Spring itself no matter the season, Nikephoros and Nicholas, encouraged by Nikephoros, are happy flowers that unfurl from bud into bloom or shoots that grow in their happy relation, which God blesses.
This letter, which attests to warm, man-to-man homosociality between these men of exalted rank, invites analysis. As these men are men of paideia, what understandings could they, educated and subtle readers, generate from this text? What kind of intertextualities might be present?
To start with, there are sexual double-entendres. At the surface level, the notion of blooming/budding/sprouting connects to male tumescence with ease. Viewing the already blooming Nikephoros asking Nicholas to bloom for him in a desiring and sexual register perhaps seems audacious, but audacity gains credibility when we consider the fact that these men are steeped in scripture and pagan literature. A survey of thallo/04AX@ and compounded and cognate forms in both scripture and the pagan literature shows why. “Time spent with” along with “straight-up” is indicative also.
In scripture, thallo/0644X@ and related forms more than once designate the growth of plant life.*° Fire can, as it were, bloom.*! It appears in relation to the human body that has been restored with the help of God:
The Lord is my helper and my shieldsman. My heart hopes with his help. I have been aided and my flesh sprouted forth (anethalen/ivé0aXev). From my will I shall sing forth grateful praises to him.
(Ps 27/28:7)?
At Phil 4:10, anathallo has a figurative meaning: “You made your concern for me sprout/bud/blossom forth.”*? And at Pr 15:13, thallo designates an interconnected relationship between feelings and physicality: “when the heart is rejoicing, the countenance blooms.”*4
And so, scripture shows the stirring of plant life and human body. There is also a connection between this physical stirring and emotional engagement. Phenomenologically, scripture suggests the possibility of male tumescence, and especially if emotions and feelings are erotic. But Nikephoros and Nicholas were not only knowledgeable about scripture, they were educated in pagan literature. Two epigrams in the Greek Anthology may have inflected Nicholas’ understanding and inspired Nikephoros’ writing of Letter 26.
The Greek Anthology, compiled by Constantine Kephalas around 900,”° was present in educated circles throughout the tenth century.*° This collection of epigrams, many of which are sexual in nature (especially the fifth and twelfth books), provides evidence of how the language of sprouting forth/ blooming and Spring was adjacent to same-sex desire and, by implication, to male tumescence. Here are two epigrams from the anthology that feature desirable boys as flowers that sprout and bloom in Spring:
The Zephyr-loving meadows don’t thrive with such flowers, the glories of spring present everywhere, as the well-born boys you will see, Dionysius, things made by the hand of the Cyprus-Born and Graces. But perhaps, outstanding among them, Milesios blooms (thallei/OGAX«1), as a rose shining among the fragrant leaves. He perhaps does not know, like the fair flower in the heat, that his season hangs on by a hair.
(Strato, Greek Anthology 12.195)*7
Having gathered with his hand the flower of boys, Eros arranged for you, Aphrodite, a garland to deceive a soul. For he twined Diodorus, the pleasing lily, and Asclepiades, the sweet white-violet. Yes indeed he plaited Herakleitos, as from thorn to rose, while a certain Dion, translucent on the vine, was blooming/budding (ethalle/é0adA&). He joined together Theron, saffron-gold flowered in his foliage, and he pitched in Ouliades, a sprig of thyme. He plucked off luxuriouslyleafed Myiskos, the always-blooming/sprouting (aeithales/aeWarés) shoot of olive, and the sprays of Aretos that inspire desire. Happiest of islands, holy Tyre, which holds Kypris’ myrrh-suffused flower-bearing grove of boys.
(Meleager, Greek Anthology 12.256)**®
Strato (second century CE), whose male-directed epigrams predominate in the twelfth book of the anthology (which is devoted to the love of boys), and Meleager (first century BCE), whose interests range to women in addition, trope their desirable boys as flowers. In the case of Strato, he concludes his poem with the remark, via the metaphor of a Spring flower burned by Summer heat, that Milesios’ beard will arrive and his desirability will at the same moment depart. Meleager presents the fanciful idea of a garland of eight boys that Eros has plaited for his mother Aphrodite. In both of these poems, there is desire for young men or boys as flowers or sprouting plant life. It is also the case that being a flower in bloom is to be the object of desire. Given that sprouting and blooming can be associated with male tumescence, it also suggests the desirability of an erect penis. Lastly, the second poem packs an erotic punch with the presence of both Eros and his mother Aphrodite.
There is another intertextuality in Letter 26, this time with Homer, in the phrases, “the sweet spring of friendship, which straight up is time spent with you.”*? This moment is significant because it reads as a doubleentendre for sexual intercourse. “Time spent with you” (he se suntuchialy 01) ovvtvxia) is sexualized by the word for “straight-up,” antikrus/avtiukpvs, if one remembers the Jliad. Antikrus/ivtucpvug is a later variant of a word, antikrulavtucpb, which occurs over 25 times in Homer. This word is memorable, as it is there when warriors die, designating the thrust of the warrior’s weapon that delivers a piercing to finish an opponent off. Here to illustrate is an instance, chosen to drive home the present point especially. It is the slaughter of Phereklos by Meriones: “When indeed Meriones caught him [Phereklos] as he pursued, he struck him through the right buttock; the point went straight up through the bladder to the bone.™° Antikrulavtucpo is always describing something pointy going into flesh. It’s a memorable adverb and in the context of Nikephoros’ letter, this adverb imports penetrative gestural energy into the letter, giving point to suntuchia/ovvtvyia and sexualizing it.
Some summary observations now about this analysis of Letter 26. In the first place, it centers same-sex desire, regarding it as something to discover and measure, since it was a notable feature of this elite masculine culture. Second, knowledge from scripture and paideia enabled Nikephoros and Nicholas to craft, share, and/or receive understandings of their world. Third, the analysis is reparative. It starts from traces, in this case both talk of blooming/budding amid warm affect and the plausible presence of intertextualities, to imagine a relation that extended to carnal expression. It is of interest that these men write in this way in the letters (and there will be more about epistolography at the beginning of Chapter 1). And this leads to a fourth and final point: as texts both reflect and create reality, this letter, and indeed other texts produced by these men and men like them, both indicated the presence of same-sex desire in Byzantine masculine homosociality and helped produce it as a possibility to be pursued. The language did not merely record desire’s presence, it provoked it.
While the enlacement of homoerotic discourse in Letter 26 is considerable, there is the matter the letter’s end. The togetherness to come of Nicholas and Nikephoros happens under the sign of divine approval: “let us, each other, together spend a spring prior to the season with our unifying God.”! This ending imparts a religious aura to the letter at its end. Is it a possible reference to ritual or spiritual brotherhood (adelphopoiesis),” given that Nikephoros refers to a unifying God? A possible way to read this letter is to allow this last moment, through its mention of God, to drive interpretation of the entire letter and render the language of sex and desire as decarnalized. On this basis, it is all spiritual and there is nothing else to see here. A much better way to proceed is to keep both body/desire and God in view, as they are present together in this letter: let juxtaposition abide.
A Comparison
Althaus-Reid’s book, Indecent Theology, offers a useful and clarifying comparison. She considers queer culture in Argentina of the later decades of the twentieth century and her ultimate goal is the elaboration of a changed and more humane theology that welcomes the broadest range possible of human sexual practices. She foregrounds sexuality and intimacy in the search to understand the sacred. Starting from the body to address theological questions is, in her varying formulations, sexual or indecent theology.** There are commonalities between with what she does and the reparative mode of reading being practiced in this book about Byzantine men. And while there are real differences, to put it mildly, between medieval Byzantium and modern Argentina, the comparison helps with perceiving the presence of something that is not supposed to be there, as it were. In the story of Father Mario, sexuality that is not approved of by a strong church achieves a degree of approval.*4 His story exemplifies how “indecent” theological thinking can be at work in people’s notions of sexuality and, apropos to the strongly religious Byzantine Empire, how societies with powerful ecclesiastical hierarchies can nonetheless have dissent and zones where the usual rules don’t apply.
In 1996, Father Mario, a young priest who served the poor in Buenos Aires, was murdered. His funeral was an elaborate occasion. Both persons high in the church hierarchy and his poor parishioners attended. In the weeks that followed, it emerged that he had been killed by a male prostitute in a dispute. There was also discovery of gay pornography in his residence. As this information came out, the church hierarchy distanced itself from Father Mario. It was different in the case of his poor flock, however. Television crews interviewed parishioners who refused to reject Father Mario, and there was even talk of building a chapel to bear his name. It also turned out that his sexual orientation was known and regarded as not worthy of concern, given all the good he had done. One of the parishioners expressed a wish that he could have spoken to them about his loneliness, so that he would not have put himself in danger and stayed among the people who loved him:
For them, Father Mario was not gay, if by gay you mean that his life was defined only by the fact that he sometimes would sleep with men. He was gay, if by gay we mean a priest who fought for peace and social justice in his Christian Base Community and who was so full of love for his people that he also longed for abundant love in his own life, and for the love and company of another man. That is indecent theological thinking.
(Althaus-Reid 2000, 138)
One could raise the objection that (some of) the parishioners would have wanted him to stay in the area where his ministry was, so that all the more easily he could have been kept in the closet. This is certainly possible, but Althaus-Reid argues for the presence of human understanding and recognition of desire. Many of his parishioners regretted his loneliness, and his sexual orientation was a secondary matter. And talk of a hoped-for chapel and wishes that he had stayed closer to his loving community are expressed after his erotic orientation to men had been made public. Rather than regard Mario’s acceptance by his community as something inexplicable, Althaus-Reid explains that ideas of who could be a cherished member of community had been changing by 1996 among conservative poor parishioners in this very Catholic nation.» A capacious sense of justice nuanced and led to disregard of principles handed down by an ecclesiastical hierarchy that would cite, as authoritative, the sedimented and centuries-old understandings of sexual matters. In other words, a community may be given universalizing principles by their leadership, but contingent situations and sense of what is fair and just lead to a situation where these principles may be rejected:
The community does not necessarily use universalizing principles, not even sexual ones, with ease all the time...communities decode the hidden values which are present and discern justice in the relationships already there.
(Althaus-Reid 2000, 138-139)
What is supposed to be rejected, according to arid and anti-humanist strictures, flourishes because the people perceive a higher moral principle at work that commanded accepting love for Father Mario. The people wished that justice had been done where his desires for intimacy were concerned. “Sexual desire mobilizes people’s concept of citizenship, and of justice.”
Althaus-Reid’s narrative of acceptance and perception of higher justice in contravention of higher authorities is an inspiration. And while there is no need for a liberatory discourse to release Byzantine masculine homoeroticism from oppression (it, verbalized so lavishly by important personages, is hardly beleaguered), it is salutary to start from the facts of desire and imagine a scene in which there are divergent viewpoints on such desire and behavior.”
Above, via the letters of Nikephoros Ouranos, this book thus far has spoken of the positive side of the ledger, as it were, and there is much more about the positive presence of same-sex desire and behavior to come. But what of the opposing side that wished for restriction? What was the situation in law and according the church, for it is important to understand both sides of this question?
Civil Law
In these centuries, there were regulations in contemporary civil law codes, mandating execution for anal sex between males (although allowances were made for young offenders), but they appear to have been unused.** It has been suggested that the laws were just copied from code to code over the course of the centuries.*? Here, from the year 741, is the first law:
Let the aselgeis, both the one doing and the one submitting, be punished by the sword. But if the one submitting should be discovered to be less than twelve years old, let him be forgiven, since his age shows that he did not understand that to which he had submitted.
Meant to guide a judge in his actions, this law addresses sexual activity directly. Anal penetration is at issue, and both the one penetrating and the one being penetrated are at fault. The two males are called aselgeis, or “shameless ones,” and their penalty is execution (“punished by the sword”), though if it is a boy under 12 who is being penetrated, he will not be punished, as the writers of the law feel that he would not have understood the importance of what was happening.
As noted above, this law is the first in a sequence of laws that stretches into the tenth century. Eklogadion 17.6 (early ninth century),>! Epanagoge 40.66 (886),°* and Prokheiros Nomos 39.73 (907) are all as terse as Ekloge 17.38, and they repeat it with but small variations.*4 The lack of enterprise in the writing of these laws, their apparent lack of use, and no recorded samesex sex scandals in Byzantium’s middle centuries supports what Angeliki Laiou had to say nearly 30 years ago:
It is possible, despite all the normative zeal to prohibit homosexual acts, that Byzantine society in fact tolerated such acts if they did not cause a scandal.
(1992, 78)°°
This revolutionary statement, while not unheralded and occasionally followed up,”° has not affected the study of Byzantine sexuality as much as it should have.
Canon Law/Penitentials
In contrast to inflexible, but brief and unused, enactments in civil law, regulations of a more liberal kind developed around same-sex behavior in canon law. These developments happen in spite the various condemnations of same-sex eroticism in the Septuagint?’ and the New Testament,>® or even in Plato’s Laws.*? Comparison between this developing situation and that in late antiquity places this liberalization in relief.
The fourth century had seen rigorous disapproval of same-sex sexual relations in the penitentials. Basil of Caesarea’s Canon 62° recommended 15 years of excommunication, and Gregory of Nyssa’s Canon 4° 18 for same-sex relations between men, referred to as “shamefulness in males” (Basil: doynpoovvy év toic &ppeow) and “madness against the male” (Gregory: ) Kata tod &ppevoc Avooa). Later in medieval times, the rigor of the Cappadocian Fathers was left behind. Theodoros the Studite (eighth to ninth century) recommended in his Canon 20 only two years’ excommunication,” if it was clear that the man would no longer be engaging in “shamefulness in men.” Men who paid no mind to this canon were to serve the entire 15 years Basil recommended, however. In the ninth or tenth century, in a collection that had been (incorrectly, as is generally accepted now) attributed to John the Faster (aka patriarch John IV,582–595),65 shorter penances also appeared.66 Canon 18 specified three years instead of Nyssa’s 18 or Basil’s 15 for “madness for the male” (arrenomania/ἀρρενομανία), and, as in the case of Theodoros the Studite’s recommendations, the unrepentant could serve Basil’s 15 years.67
In another canon, sex against nature between men (and the reference is to anal penetration: eis andra pesontes/εἰς ἄνδρα πεσόντες) drew two years of penance for those who did it only “once, twice or three times” (3: hapax e dis e tris/ ἅπαξ ἢ δὶς ἢ τρίς) and who were under 30 years of age or illiterate, or not in possession of a wife.68 Still another canon specified three years for those who were older and who were guilty of “doing this only once, twice or three times.”69 A careful reading of the canons also yields the conclusion that anal sex with another man was less serious than anal sex with one’s own wife: the mildest penance for anal sex with a wife was five years and could go as high as ten.70 The level of detail in these penitentials is also notable. Mutual masturbation between men is mentioned in one,71 and another features a discussion of anal sex (arsenokoitia/ἀρσενοκοιτία) that considers the respective statuses of those who receive, those who give, and those who like both: Concerning arsenokoitia. Arsenokoitia has three different kinds. One is to suffer it from another. This is less serious, whether on account of being under age, or poverty, or rape, or other various reasons. Another is doing it, and this is more serious than suffering it. Then there is suffering it from someone else and doing it to another. This will not be pardoned.72
There are details and mitigating factors, and even what we call versatility among gay men today is a recognized possibility. A take-away, then, is the evident ease about discussing same-sex sexual relations that one will not find, say, in early modern western Europe, or earlier among the Cappadocian Fathers. This is not a situation where desire cannot speak its name: routes to carnal satisfaction are known and discussed. Same-sex sexual acts between men are temptations of the flesh and, as such, are to be avoided, but commission of mutual masturbation or arsenokoitia is not an unspeakable failing, as there is, well, speech. Men in the Life of Mary the Younger A look at another text, also from the ambit of the church, further supports the idea that the Byzantine Empire at this time had a degree of relaxation and frankness around same-sex relations between men. In an anonymous work of hagiography, the Life of Mary the Younger, from either the tenth or eleventh century,73 the narrative turns to one of the sons of Mary: Baanes.74 Though married, the soldier Baanes, beloved by the other soldiers,75 was particularly close to Theodoros. He was “yoked” to this man, and description of their life together features metaphorical language that is curiously graphic and even coarse:
[Baanes] had a certain Theodoros as fellow ascetic and helper in all his excellent exploits...a man brave and strong in military matters but braver still in conducting his life for God. Yoked to him, like a bull of good lineage and strong, they were ploughing in/within one another (erotrion en heautois\potpiwv év éavtoic) as though into rich farmland, and they were sowing the seeds of excellences, as though the best of farmers. At the right moment, they harvested with rejoicing. They laid up for themselves fruits beautiful to God in divine vats and got for themselves joy forever.
(Life of Mary the Younger 30/704)
The word, “yoked” (suzeuchtheis/ovGevy9eic), is often used to refer to married couples, and it is difficult to suppress thoughts of anal sex as they plough in or within one another. And the writer does not make it easy for thoughts of anal sex to be left behind. At the beginning of the next section, less than 100 words away, Baanes’ final illness was a diseased bowel.’” Furthermore, this relationship between Baanes and Theodoros was not sui generis. Their closeness is prefigured by the relationship that Mary’s husband Nikephoros had with a certain Bardas Bratzes.
Bardas was married to Mary’s sister and he suggested to his dear friend Nikephoros that he marry Mary. A marriage connection would bring them closer together:
“Since,” he says, “O dearest of men to me, we have become deeply involved with each other and are bound by our intimate relationship (sunetheias/ovvyOsiac). I think it right to make this, our bond of love, stronger and more perfect and to apply the ties of kinship to it, so that we may be joined in two ways, forging a family connection along with our intimate relationship (sunetheias/ovvySEias).”
(Life of Mary the Younger 2/692)'8
Nikephoros ultimately followed this advice,’? and the word Bardas employs to describe the men’s intimate relationship, sunetheia/ovvnPeia, is capable of designating both close friendship and sexual relations.8° And of course, it is a bond of love too (desmon...tes agapes/Seoov...ti\¢ ayanN6).
Accordingly, then, two generations of men in this saint’s life have strong relationships with other men, and the depiction of these connections have in the case of Nikephoros and Bardas hints of corporeal closeness and, in the case of Theodoros and Baanes, boldly sexualizing imagery.*! The conclusion to draw is that intimations of sexual behavior, and even strong images of carnality, can be unremarkable in ecclesiastical contexts. And such a collocation is visible in Letter 26 of Nikephoros Ouranos, and will be seen later in Symeon the New Theologian’s writings. Furthermore, there is the liberalizing of the penitentials and desuetude of civil law. All these things imply a variety of viewpoints on desire and sexual behavior between Byzantine men.
Prospect
The chapters to follow center desire, connection, and happy affect in a reparative approach to the evidence. Relying on the assumption that desire and sexual behavior are indeterminate, and part of the time were viewed in positive terms, the reparative narratives to come draw pictures of wholes from fragments. The subject is how the elite men in this book, who were not strangers to same-sex desire and who were a group of men of differing bodily morphologies, both eunuchs and intact, related to one another and built connection in a scene that had contradictions: things somatic were both valued and disdained; same-sex desire and same-sex sexual behavior were valued and capable of being invoked with scant euphemism, while at the same time subject to ecclesiastical and legal sanction. Contemporary readers and writers possessed education in things secular (e.g., the masterpieces of Greek literature) and sacred (e.g., scripture, the writings of the church fathers), and this fact licenses searching intertextual readings of texts that surface subtexts and imagine contemporary Byzantine understandings of things sexual and bodily.
Chapter | looks back 50 or so years before Nikephoros Ouranos to the court of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos. A network of letter writers, involving court figures and including the emperor himself, is considered with the aim of documenting relations that are marked by the kinds of desirous language already seen in the letters discussed in this introduction. These men’s carnally provocative letters tell a tale about the nature of these men’s relations. And while this tale is valuable in and of itself, it serves a purpose in addition: this network contains men who were also historiographers, including Symeon the Logothete and, quite likely, Theodoros Daphnopates, and Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, who commissioned the histories and rewarded the historiographers.
Composing historiographies was one of the ways a man acquired position and achieved promotion in these elite homosocial environs. This matters because the earliest surviving accounts of the rise of Emperor Basil I, who is known, among other things, for his ritual brotherhoods and the sexy contours of his coming to the notice of figures in Michael III’s court in the ninth century, are the product of this warmly homosocial group of letter writers/historiographers. Their letters illuminate their history writing, i.e., they conceived of events in the previous century in terms they found plausible: as a homoerotic court milieu obtains in and around the epistolographers/ historiographers, so they imagine one extant in the previous century.
The second chapter passes from the networks of letter writers to consider six historiographies written in court circles in the mid-tenth century. These accounts contain narratives of Basil making his way to the throne. The chapter pays attention to moments in these historiographies that feature same-sex desire, masculine beauty, and intimations of carnality. Basil’s sexiness and beauty were both an asset and a liability, the former because his good looks and athletic prowess brought him to the attention of powerful men and enabled his rise, and the latter because he resembled a bit too much members of Emperor Michael III’s debauched court. The positive and negative valences discernible in the presentation of Basil recall the conflict in Byzantine society around same-sex desire and the body; valuing coexisted with disdain and even legal or ecclesiastical sanction.
Chapter 3 concerns itself with ritual brotherhood or adelphopoiesis. It starts with Basil I’s brotherhoods in the historiographies, teasing out subtexts in the narrations and speculating about how Byzantine audiences would have understood them. These readings of the historiographers are then contextualized by visualization of the adelphopoiesis rite and close reading of an elaborate brotherhood prayer, a prayer that shares vocabulary and depictions of warm man-to-man relations with epistolography and historiography. Ultimately, it must be concluded that brothers are what brothers do. And it appears that carnality was something eminently possible, as both historiography and ritual speak not only of spiritual union but also of bodily closeness in various ways. In the tenth century, the ritual was not a license to have sex, but functioned to bring men together in a scene that frequently, though with ambivalence, called same-sex desire to mind in homosocial settings.
Chapter 4 offers a case study of the bachelorhood of Emperor Basil II (976-1025). This study builds on previous chapters’ depiction of Byzantine elite homosociality and the place of same-sex desire in it. On the throne for almost 50 years, the energetic and militarily inclined Basil II notoriously never wed. The chapter first discusses how his demurral to take a wife has been explained in unsatisfactory ways in the scholarly literature. It is better to place Basil’s refusal to wed in the context of Byzantine masculine homosociality that at times prizes same-sex relations. Discussion of Symeon the New Theologian’s notorious parable of an emperor who, instead of chastising a rebel, takes him to bed for a night of love, shows a way in to placing Basil’s bachelorhood in this context. Symeon wrote the parable around 30 years into Basil I’s reign, so his readers had a natural referent in Basil. Viewed from within the context of the picture presented in this book of male homosocial relations in the upper reaches of Byzantine society, this parable is not odd. It uses an unremarkable scene in men’s lives as a metaphor for God’s solicitous concern for humanity and, at most, delivers mild castigation of the emperor for being too devoted to things of the body (with plausible deniability built in, as it is but a parable meant to serve another goal altogether: that of speaking of God’s grace). In addition, the parable is evidence of a reading generally abroad in Byzantine society of Basil’s decision not to wed. The homoeroticism in the parable involving an emperor should also be seen as being of a piece with, and as uncontroversial as the homoerotic sensuality to be seen in the epistolography and historiography of the time.
The conclusion returns to Nikephoros Ouranos and a reading of one more of his letters. Letter 29 is another warmly homosocial letter and one that concerns itself with brotherhood. A hitherto overlooked source on adelphopoiesis, Letter 29 offers evidence of multiple connections in this powerful eunuch man’s life and of multiple ritual brotherhoods in an extended homosocial group. The letter also attests to how a eunuch man would connect himself to other men and how closely this ritual was embraided with the full range of masculine homosociality that is the object of reparative inquiry in this book.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق