Download PDF | (Greek Culture in the Roman World) Steven D. Smith - Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture_ Gender, Desire, and Denial in the Age of Justinian-Cambridge University Press (2019).
292 Pages
GREEK EPIGRAM AND BYZANTINE CULTURE
Sexy, scintillating, and sometimes scandalous, Greek epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian commemorate the survival of the sensual in a world transformed by Christianity. Around 567 ce, the poet and historian Agathias of Myrina published his Cycle, an anthology of epigrams by contemporary poets who wrote about what mattered to elite men in sixth-century Constantinople: harlots and dancing girls, chariot races in the hippodrome, and the luxuries of the Roman bath. But amid this banquet of worldly delights, ascetic Christianity – pervasive in early Byzantine thought – made sensual pleasure both more complicated and more compelling.
In this book, Steven D. Smith explores how this miniature classical genre gave expression to lurid fantasies of domination and submission, constraint and release, and the relationship between masculine and feminine. The volume will appeal to literary scholars and historians interested in Greek poetry, late antiquity, Byzantine studies, early Christianity, gender, and sexuality.
steven d. smith is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University, New York. His publications include Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: The Romance of Empire (2007) and Man and Animal in Severan Rome: The Literary Imagination of Claudius Aelianus (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Introduction
The image: a gathering of men, a lavish banquet, conspicuous consumption. The guests have gorged themselves on delicacies – fish in elegant sauce, roasted fowl, fancy pastries – and their dishes litter the table. Wine trickles in rivulets from their lips and spills in puddles beneath their couches. The capacious mixing bowl with its gaping mouth beckons the revelers to imbibe more, even though they’re already stuffed and they can feel the food and wine rising in their throats. The shuttered windows fail to muffle the sounds rising from the street below, where a feast day procession wends its way through the city to the great church. The banqueters hear the refrain of the liturgical hymn – half chanted, half sung by the parade of the pious – but it doesn’t stop them from their Dionysian revelry, as they provoke each other beyond satiety to a profound drunkenness. The men sing their own songs, epigrams in the old style, many of them erotic. They imitate what they hear, concocting impromptu variations, and an intense rivalry adds heat to the flirtatious camaraderie.
They role-play as kitchen slaves, pretending to cook up fancy poems for fancy guests. But such role-playing is a game for the privileged, for many of these men are lawyers with sterling educations who spend their days poring over legal documents in the Imperial Stoa, and some are very important men indeed, men close to the Emperor – rich men, men with power. It’s the middle of the sixth century, the age of Justinian, and these men are citizens of Byzantium, Constantinople, New Rome. One of these men took it upon himself to collect the poems that he and his friends composed and performed in each other’s company. His name was Agathias, one of the lawyers, and he came from a distinguished family in Myrina, on the western coast of Asia Minor.
One hundred of Agathias’ own poems survive from his original collection of epigrams, and we also have eighty epigrams by Agathias’ close friend Paul Silentiarios, one of the wealthy men at the banquet and one who was also very well connected. His name reflects his official title: as silentiarius, his job was to maintain the silence of the Imperial palace, especially in the presence of the Emperor. Others were also frequent contributors to the anthology: Julian the Egyptian, Makedonios Consul, John Barboukallos, Damocharis of Cos, and the other lawyers, Leontios, Marianos, Theaitetos, and Eratosthenes.1 Apart from Agathias and Paul, these names are not well known to either classicists or Byzantinists, and yet these poets, part of the social and literary fabric of sixth-century Constantinople, helped shape early Byzantine culture. Agathias published his anthology around 567, shortly after the death of the Emperor Justinian and the accession of Justin II and his wife, the Empress Sophia.
For later generations, Agathias’ anthology would rank alongside the renowned poetic garlands of Meleager and Philip, compiled centuries earlier.2 Agathias, too, calls his anthology a “garland” or “wreath,” but the tenth-century Souda lexicon refers to it as “the Cycle of the new Epigrams,” 3 and on the basis of this attestation modern scholars now conventionally refer to the sixth-century collection as the Cycle of Agathias. The rowdy banquet of misbehaving men gives readers a boisterous, messy, and lively introduction to the anthology. Agathias’ description of his circle’s gluttonous gathering evokes the wild world of Aristophanic comedy (in iambic verse, too), and thus sets the stage for the themes to which these poets return again and again: sensual pleasure, desire gratified and deferred, embodiment and transcendence, domination and submission, sex and power, the rigorous differentiation between masculine and feminine, but also the fluidity and manipulability of gender.
Out of this tangle of interrelated themes, patterns emerge. First, the provocative, sensual masculinity that frames the anthology depends upon and receives its energy from the contemporary power of Christian asceticism, a reminder that the austere morality of the desert fathers is never far from the carnival of urban delights. Second, lavish panegyric of Imperial dominance resonates with fantasies of sexual gratification to produce a strange analogy between songs for the Emperor and the songs of Aphrodite. As a corollary to this erotics of conquest and violence, women’s voices find ways of speaking out and they have the power to challenge, undermine, and seduce masculine authority and pleasure. Ultimately, Agathias and his circle explore the destabilization of both the Imperial and erotic subject and embrace a shifting positionality that moves between modes of dominance and submission and, along a different axis, between masculine and feminine.
If, as Jackie Murray and Jonathan M. Rowland have argued, Hellenistic epigrams of earlier centuries began to experiment with “an entirely new type of gendered voice, a voice that is simultaneously masculine and feminine,” 4 then the epigrams of the Byzantine poets mark a new phase in that experimentation within an Imperial culture transformed by Christian thought.5 In 1970, Averil Cameron recognized that the poetic activities of Agathias and his peers “were not so far removed from contemporary life as one might have thought. There is all the time in their work a blend of the literary and the realistic, the conventional and the new.” 6 It is the aim of this book to take up Cameron’s proposition and to uncover just how thoroughly the Cycle of Agathias was embedded within late Roman and early Byzantine culture, with all its complexities and contradictions. Along with Averil Cameron and Alan Cameron, the classical scholars Axel Mattson, Giovanni Viansino, and Heinrich Schulte have provided invaluable studies and commentaries on the Cycle poets, but for the most part classicists have had little to say about the poetry of the sixth century. Hardly ever central even within studies of classical epigram, the early Byzantine poems from the Greek Anthology appear to classicists mostly as fascinating curiosities of literary history, glittering stars flaring up at the twilight of classical culture.
When classicists do write about poems from the Cycle of Agathias, they almost always do so with an apology for their belatedness, as though the refined literary efforts of sixth-century poets would be an affront to classical sensibilities. In her masterful study of epigrams on Timomachus’ famous painting of Medea, for example, Kathryn Gutzwiller refers to the poem by Julian the Egyptian (APl. 139) only once in forty-seven pages, apparently because it is “a much later epigram,” 7 even though it is centrally positioned within the Medeasequence (APl. 135–143). Regina Höschele, too, in a superb essay on the motif of the “traveling reader” in ancient epigram books, feels the need to explain why consideration of Agathias’ preface to the Cycle merits inclusion in her study. “To be sure,” Höschele writes, Agathias’ poem is “rather late,” but classicists need not fear: “Agathias offers a sophisticated version of the motif and very likely followed a tradition that had been there for centuries.” 8 Among classicists, poems from the Cycle of Agathias still have a very bad reputation. Byzantinists, on the other hand, tend to read the sixth-century epigrams as inconsequential expressions of classical paideia, even if they recognize that the poets themselves were men of consequence in sixth-century culture. Claudia Rapp, for example, in her survey of literary culture in the Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, notes that, alongside the works of Agapetos, John Malalas, and Romanos the Melode, the Cycle of Agathias was one of the most popular books in the sixth century and in later generations. But Rapp also perpetuates the relative devaluation of classicizing epigrams within an emergent Byzantine culture, for the hymns of Romanos provide serious “spiritual edification,” while the poems by Paul and Agathias offer merely “light literary enjoyment.” 9 Anthony Kaldellis, too, wonders with curiosity at the fact that Agathias and his peers “exchanged and collected erotic (and even homoerotic) epigrams as well as Christian and pagan poems. Apparently, there was nothing incongruous in writing a description of Hagia Sophia one day and an epigram about feeling up a woman’s soft breasts on the next. We should not assume that any of this was a faithful reflection of contemporary life.” 10
Despite the apparent triviality of classicizing epigram in the sixth century, however, Rapp nevertheless emphasizes the practical function of such literary activity for poets eager to display their paideia, because “education marked a man’s position in society. Not only did it provide him with the skills to make a living, it also guaranteed his membership in a circle of like-minded intellectuals.” 11 From this perspective, the Cycle appears as a strange cultural product indeed: a collection of frivolous diversions totally irrelevant to the more serious spiritual concerns of the age, while paradoxically also an ultra-refined instrument of social ambition within an elite class of learned men. This paradox is worth pursuing, and the historian Peter N. Bell, in Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian: Its Nature, Management, and Mediation, breaks new theoretical ground with his impressive sociological approach to understanding the “extreme cultural complexity” 12 of the eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century. Bell carefully untangles the intersecting ideological discourses that produced the rich trove of literary and material evidence from this period. Early Byzantine culture thus emerges not as a “conscience collective” (to use Durkheim’s phrase)13 but as a network of overlapping conflicts in nearly all spheres of life, from religion, class, and politics, to literature, public entertainments, and marriage. When it comes to the Cycle poets, however, Bell, too, succumbs to the temptation to see their works as opaque expressions of classical paideia.
Though he discusses Paul Silentiarios’ Ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia at length, Bell refers to the epigrams of Agathias and Paul only once in his book. For Bell, their erotic and “Pagan” epigrams are emblematic of the difficulty facing historians in determining the “ideological shifts from an underlying classical to a Christian cultural paradigm.” 14 Choosing to work within a refined, allusive, and erudite classical genre, in other words, the poets make it impossible to penetrate to their supposedly real social and political motivations. But if we read the Cycle epigrams simply as late expressions of classical paideia on “un-Christian erotic themes” 15 that appear to have nothing to do with real life, then we fail to read the poems as complex artifacts exhibiting the very conflicts that Bell rightly identifies as definitive of the age.
It’s more productive, I argue, to think about the rich connections between the erotic themes of the Cycle and the ambient Christian culture of Byzantium, and philology can help to trace the ideological intersectionality that these classicizing epigrams display right on their surface for all to see. Justinian’s consolidation of ecclesiastical, legal, and Imperial power sought to produce subjects who enthusiastically identified with a Mediterraneanwide, unified Rome steadfastly grounded in Christian orthodoxy. Justinian’s legislation, for example, attempts to stabilize gender and to condemn illicit forms of desire along religious lines.
Two new regulations targeted sexual activity between males, allegedly to protect the Empire from God’s wrath. The first law, Novella 77, issued in 538, was directed at men “possessed by the power of the devil” who “have both plunged themselves into grievous licentiousness and do what is the opposite of nature itself.” The second law, Novella 141, issued in 559, demanded the repentance of “those growing putrid together with the loathsome and unholy deed justly hateful to God; indeed we mean the corruption of males, which in an ungodly manner some dare, males with males, by committing obscenity,” this last phrase a quotation of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 1:27. 16
And what about women? As Leslie Brubaker puts it, men were the “normative legal gender,” and women only appear in “legislation dealing with marriage, the family, or the protection of female virtue.” 17 Justinian’s regulation against sex trafficking, for example – Novella 14, issued in 535 – however admirable, was premised not on the belief that violence against girls and women is inherently wrong, but that forcing girls and women into the sex trade prevented them from maintaining their chastity (sōphrosynē), “which alone has been able confidently to commend the souls of mankind to God.” Even at its most protective and humane, Justinian’s legislation nevertheless sought to keep women in their place in society.18 But Justinian’s legislation was just one mechanism within a much larger social and cultural context that scripted for Byzantine subjects normative ideas about sex, gender, and desire. This study builds on Judith Butler’s theory that gender is performative, a repertoire of “acts, gestures, enactments” – taught, mimicked, and repeated over the course of a life and from generation to generation – that produce the illusory effect that identity possesses a “gender core,” and the illusion of gender is “discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” 19
The gendered subject is, in other words, a role prescribed by our social and cultural conditioning that we learn to play from infancy and that we internalize to such a degree that we feel that both the role and the performance are natural and real. But to be aware of the illusory quality of one’s gendered identity also means that one can glean the possibility of other, new performances, that one could in fact inhabit a different role. Put another way, there will always be ways of reimagining gender and desire that escape normative scripting, and these new reimaginings, if they do not entirely subvert, at least productively trouble the ideological system in which they are embedded. Justinian himself may even have grudgingly agreed with Butler, for this Emperor, like no other in late antiquity, saw it as his job to reinforce and regulate at all levels the discursive framework that would produce good Roman men and women who were pleasing to God. Independently of Justinian’s zealous imposition of normative Byzantine identity from the top down, men and women of every social status cultivated an orthodox self by means of their active participation in liturgy. As Derek Krueger has demonstrated, the elaborate narratives crafted by the sixth-century hymnographyer Romanos the Melode and chanted during the all-night vigils before major church festivals involved the laity in the probing interiority of biblical sinners before Christ.20 Romanos was a contemporary of Agathias and Paul Silentiarios – they all lived in the same city at the same time – but he composed a very different kind of poetry that offered powerful models of Christian selfhood and that invited participants in the liturgy to actually vocalize for themselves the formation of Christian subjectivity. The epigrams of the Cycle poets, by contrast, give voice to an “I” for whom Christian liturgy is not enough. Consider Romanos’ hymn On the Harlot, a conflation of two stories about sinful women from the New Testament,21 which was performed on the Wednesday of Holy Week.
The hymn is an elaborate masterpiece that typifies Romanos’ dynamic poetic imagination, but focusing on just a few details here will suffice to bring Romanos’ hymn into dialogue with early Byzantine epigram. In every stanza of the hymn, the poet revels in the sensual details of life that throw into sharp relief the allure of the material world as an enticement for new pleasures at the side of Christ. The hymn opens with the arresting image of Christ’s words falling upon the harlot (ἡ πόρνη) like herbs or spices sprinkled on food for a fine banquet (καθάπερ ἀρώματα | ῥαινόμενα, 10.1.1–2). The experience awakens in the harlot a sense of shame and a desire to partake of the “breath of life” (πνοὴν ζωῆς, 3) that Christ offers to the faithful. At this point the singer/ narrator imagines that there must have been in attendance at that transformative scene also male harlots (τότε τοῖς πόρνοις ἐκεῖ, 7), and he confesses that he counts himself as one of that group and likewise ready for the same scourges that terrified the sinful woman to repent of her harlotry. Figuring himself as a male harlot, an avowed lover of sexual pleasure, Romanos’ singer/narrator signals his humility before the sublime biblical model and at the same time offers the laity a way of identifying with the liturgical drama about to unfold. But to identify with the drama in this way is also to express longing to change, to be scared (πτοούμενος, 10) of sinfulness. Despite her own spiritual awakening, however, the repentant harlot still speaks as one enslaved to the appetites of the body: unlike Agathias’ gourmand-poets, her soul is now awakened by “the scent of Christ’s table” (ἡ ὀσμὴ τῆς τραπέζης τοῦ Χριστοῦ) to which she arrives “at a gluttonous run” (λίχνῳ δρόμῳ, 10.3.1–5). Abandoning all her “former men” (τοὺς ποτέ) she directs her longing now toward Christ alone, who has become her “lover” (τὸν ἐραστήν μου, 5.1–6).
Even as Romanos’ singer/narrator at the beginning and end of the hymn confesses his failure to live up to the ideal of the harlot’s repentance, the laity communally shares the hymn’s refrain, repeated eighteen times:22 a desire to be cleansed “of the filth of my deeds” (τοῦ βορβόρου τῶν ἔργων μου). Compare now a remarkable epigram by Paul Silentiarios, who adopts the persona of a woman as she delights in the abject pleasure of her promiscuity: Ἱππομένην φιλέουσα νόον προσέρεισα Λεάνδρῳ· ἐν δὲ Λεανδρείοις χείλεσι πηγνυμένη εἰκόνα τὴν Ξάνθοιο φέρω φρεσί· πλεξαμένη δὲ Ξάνθον ἐς Ἱππομένην νόστιμον ἦτορ ἄγω. πάντα τὸν ἐν παλάμῃσιν ἀναίνομαι· ἄλλοτε δ’ ἄλλον αἰὲν ἀμοιβαίοις πήχεσι δεχνυμένη ἀφνειὴν Κυθέρειαν ὑπέρχομαι. εἰ δέ τις ἡμῖν μέμφεται, ἐν πενίῃ μιμνέτω οἰογάμῳ. (AP 5.232 Paul Silentiarios) Kissing Hippomenes, I set my mind on Leander. And while planted on the lips of Leander, I bear in my heart an image of Xanthos. And while embracing Xanthos, I lead my heart back to Hippomenes. I spurn each one that’s in my grasp, and sometimes receiving one man and sometimes another in my promiscuous arms, I seek to procure for myself a rich Kythereia. And if someone finds fault with me, let him be content with the poverty of monogamy. It must be stressed first that although the theme of celebrating multiple loves was a traditional one within the epigrammatic tradition, Paul’s poetic models appear in what is now Book 12 of the Greek Anthology, containing Hellenistic poems on pederastic themes and the infamous Mousa Paidikē assembled by Straton in the second century.23 Most of the earlier poems on this theme depict a male lover rhapsodizing about the charms of the boys whom he desires, but Paul has transformed the homoerotic scenario so that the speaker is a woman who can’t be satisfied by just one man – a courtesan (hetaira) perhaps, or possibly, as Waltz tantalizingly suggests, “a certain corrupt great lady from the court of Justinian.” 24 But the epigram is no less queer for its overtly heterosexual camouflage, for, as I have written elsewhere, “a provocative, transgressive sexuality remains.” 25 Nor has Paul’s feminine persona prevented the historian Wolfgang Liebeschütz from describing this epigram as frankly “homoerotic.” 26 Liberated from a controlling narrative of salvation and spiritual cleansing, Paul’s harlot remains joyfully unrepentant.
Her mind and her arms flow easily from one man to the next, from Hippomenes to Leander, from Leander to Xanthos, and from Xanthos back to Hippomenes in what appears to be an endless cycle. In a metapoetic sense, as she makes the rounds from lover to lover Paul’s harlot creates her own erotic garland. Indeed, the names of her lovers have literary and mythological pedigrees, strongly suggesting that Paul’s epigram is playing with its status as a selfconsciously literary work of art. Hippomenes, the famous lover of Atalanta in myth, won his bride by tossing golden apples in her way to distract her from the footrace in which she bested her many suitors; Paul’s harlot, by contrast, is distracted only by other men.27 The name Leander recalls the equally famous lover of Hero, whose story as recounted in Musaeus’ wellknown epyllion inspired Paul and Agathis in other epigrams, too.28 In Musaeus’ poem, Leander’s beloved, though a priestess of Aphrodite, must be persuaded to give up her commitment to chastity and submit to romantic erōs; unlike Hero, Paul’s harlot needs no erotic instruction from her Leander. The literary allusion behind Paul’s use of the name Xanthos is more ambiguous. The Hellenistic poet Moero of Byzantium (third century bce) in her work known as the Curses recounted the story of Alkinoe, a woman so consumed by her love for the young man Xanthos that she abandoned her husband and children, an apt poetic archetype for Paul’s harlot.29 The most famous Xanthos from myth, however, is not a human male at all, but a horse, and not just any horse, but the horse of Achilles that speaks with a human voice at the end of Book 19 of the Iliad. If we are not meant to imagine Paul’s harlot in the monstrous embrace of an equine lover,30 then an erotic allusion to the famous horse of Achilles at least represents a comic degradation of epic. Jeffrey Henderson notes that when characters in Old Comedy refer to the horse, they “refer only to the phallus,” 31 and so Xanthos’ name also suggests the lover’s prodigious physical endowment: Paul’s harlot lusts for a man hung like a horse.
This interpretation gains support by the fact that the embrace of Xanthos makes Paul’s harlot think once again about Hippomenes, whose name, from hippos (“horse”) and menos (“spirit, passion”) insinuates that he, too, is a “spirited horse” of a lover. Such word play even motivates readers to imagine that the harlot’s lovers may be star charioteers from the hippodrome of Constantinople. Paul’s wicked literary games imply pure artifice, but the epigram illustrates precisely how the fantasies of art can take on the scandalous force of reality, for though in one moment Xanthos resides only as an “image” (εἰκόνα) in the woman’s heart, we see her in the very same verse suddenly entangled in Xanthos’ arms. In Paul’s literary imagination, image and logos can be made flesh. The harlot who speaks in Paul’s poem may herself be an image, whether painted portrait or polychromatic mosaic,32 but Paul has the pleasure of giving her a voice, and she claims that she lives and loves and works in the poet’s own world, for she makes a living from lust and calls her Aphrodite a “rich Kythereia” (ἀφνειὴν Κυθέρειαν). The adjective ἀφνειός (“rich”) comes from the noun ἄφενος, the “revenue” that has made this woman wealthy and powerful. Paul uses the same adjective once also in his verse Ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia, where he describes the holy altar of the great church as being “embellished with the radiance of precious (ἀφνειῶν) stones” (754). Paul’s language insinuates that the jewels encrusted upon Christ’s altar are the same kind of costly jewels that decorate the harlot’s body.
In the final couplet of his epigram, Paul’s harlot even seems to enter the sacred space of the church and engage in direct dialogue with the characters from Romanos’ hymn, indicating that she is indeed a woman of Byzantium and no stranger to the demands of Christian piety. The person who “finds fault” (μέμφεται) with her behavior recalls Simon, the Pharisee in whose house Romanos’ harlot anoints Christ’s feet. In the hymn, Simon casts blame not just on the harlot, but also on Jesus, who as a prophet, should have recognized “the woman whom each of us knows” (10.13.3). Jesus defends himself and the harlot, saying “I seemed to you blameworthy (μεμπτέος), since I didn’t expose a woman hastening to escape from her lawlessness ... but your blame (μομφή) is not reasonable” (14.1–3). Paul’s harlot, on the contrary, doesn’t need Christ to defend her, for anyone who reproaches her for her promiscuity must “be content with the poverty of monogamy,” a witty rebuke to Romanos’ repentant harlot, who claims that she now has only one lover in Christ and who consequently disdains the “unjust wealth” (11.9) that she acquired from her former lovers. Romanos’ hymn and Paul’s epigram both share a fascination with sensuality.
Thomas Arentzen has brilliantly argued that Romanos’ poetry “exposes an orientation toward the sensual details of mythic life. Things visible, touchable, or imaginable take precedence over anything metaphysical.” 33 Romanos’ hymns were, after all, competing with the city’s often racy public entertainments and so sought to bring some sex into the liturgy: his repentant harlot thus throbs with a vibrant sensuality.34 But – and this is key – Romanos’ responsibly Christian hymn must also call the laity to recognize their own failure as sinners and to strive to live up to the repentant harlot’s model behavior. Romanos engages his audience to identify with the biblical drama, to confront the Christian ideal represented by the repentant harlot, and ultimately, as Krueger aptly puts it, “to display disappointment with the self.” 35 Paul’s epigram by contrast rejects the Christian lesson and displays instead a frank delight in the pursuit and satisfaction of abject pleasures. His harlot remains sensual without worrying about sin, and in fact knowing that she is a sinner seems to give her even more pleasure.36 The textual, discursive play of classical Greek epigram offered the early Byzantine poets living in Justinian’s orthodox society an alternative matrix within which to fantasize and play out transgressive, subversive, even queer desires.
By using the term “queer,” I am not retrojecting modern identity categories into a sixth-century context that did not know gay men, lesbian women, or bi and trans people. On the contrary, I want to meet the Byzantine poets on their own terms and to explore how they find pleasure in porneia (“harlotry”), moicheia (“adultery”), paiderastia (“pederasty”), malakia (“softness”), and the infamous figure of the kinaidos (“effeminate male”). But I also read in the early Byzantine epigrams an impulse to play with and even trouble normative expectations of gender and desire, and this impulse invites methodologies of interpretation associated with the socalled “queer turn” in criticism and literary analysis. This approach may result in tracing continuities between some provocative forms of Byzantine pleasure and modern queer identities, but it will also expose discontinuities that will continue to other the Byzantines for modern readers, queer and non-queer alike. Early Byzantine epigram – a seemingly nugatory genre whose very frivolity disarms – offers a masquerade of varied personae that fulfill sometimes shocking fantasies. Agathias’ gluttonous banqueters and Paul’s unrepentant harlot are just the beginning. Experience what it’s like to choke the submissive neck of a defeated barbarian foe, or alternatively to enjoy rough sex with a hetaira or even to seduce a virgin. In these fantasies, being bad feels good. Cheat with another man’s wife in church, or positively revel in slavish, boot-licking devotion to the Emperor.
That might be what the Emperor himself wants anyway, but such behavior, traditionally problematic for Roman men, pushed the limits of late antique humility. Or again: abandon the expectations of normative masculinity entirely in submitting to a woman’s dominance, or entertain the tantalizing possibilities available to you in being such a woman. Perhaps you crave the adulation showered upon the hippodrome’s star charioteer, or do you crave to move your body in the rhythmic undulations of a pantomime dancer to captivate throngs of men? The epigrams of the Cycle of Agathias accommodate all these fantasies and more. To use a definition familiar to the Byzantine poets themselves, fantasy (phantasia/φαντασία) is, simply put, an image conjured in the mind. Fantasies may be mundane and benign (“I want to make love to that dancer”), but they may also give expression to scandalous pleasures (“I want to be promiscuous”) or even unspeakable desires (“I want to be Emperor”). The fantasies on offer in Byzantine epigram – especially in erotic epigram – most obviously invite identification with the “I” who speaks in the poem: to share, for example, in the unrepentant harlot’s delight in her own sexual promiscuity. But fantasy also fragments, multiplies, and proliferates subjectivity so that it becomes possible to identify with the entire scene of fantasy: in Paul’s epigram, “I” am the harlot, but “I” am also Hippomenes, who enjoys sharing this harlot with Leander and Xanthos, the other men with whom “I” also identify. In fantasy, “all positions are the subject, even as this subject has proliferated beyond recognition.” 37 Fantasies may also appear to be entirely subjective, but in fact every fantasy is informed by the subject’s cultural, social, and historical context, which accounts for the curiously ambiguous nature of fantasy. Expressions of libidinous desire can only have a scandalizing social force if articulated within an ideological system that seeks at every level to prohibit those desires, but by some strange paradox that same system functions best by accommodating and incorporating within itself and in plain sight alternative narratives that antagonize its own ideology.
In this regard the subject of fantasy simultaneously subverts and reinforces the ideological network in which she is embedded. Slavoj Žižek offers a compelling description of this phenomenon: “an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it.” 38 Early Byzantine society thus produced its perfect poets in Agathias and Paul Silentiarios, men whose scandalous literary fantasies draw energy from – and hence also paradoxically reinscribe – Imperial power and the moral imperatives of orthodox society.39 The “imp of perversity” 40 dreams of sensual pleasure but he also obediently takes his place in Imperial architecture when required: Agathias has to scribble away with the other scholastikoi in the Imperial Stoa, and even the wealthy and affluent Paul puts his poetic talent in the service of the Emperor and Patriarch when he composes and publicly performs his famous Ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia. Fantasy thus plays a crucial role in the constitution of an ideological system. An ideological system can only work, after all, if it produces subjects who maintain a certain distance and who do not overidentify with the moral imperatives imposed upon them. The hymns of Romanos work so well in Byzantine society not just because they vividly dramatize biblical models for a Christian life, but also because they flirt with the contemporary fascination with sex and sensuality: Romanos’ hymns humanize the Christian experience. Classical epigram, too, retains its meaningful edge in this period by being fun and sexy, but unlike the hymns of Romanos, the poems of Paul and Agathias positively luxuriate in sin and seek pleasure at the limits.41
Practitioners of epigram could always disavow the seriousness of their literary enterprise: these were trivialities composed in a spirit of jest and play, “mere” representations that did not themselves have the force of actions.42 Modern critics, too, as we have seen, perpetuate this idea. Marc Lauxtermann, in his excellent study of later Byzantine poetry, says of the classicizing fantasies of the Cycle poets: “There is no reason to believe that this kind of literature has anything to do with real life, genuine sentiments or particular persuasions. It is mere fiction, an exercise in the art of literary discourse.” 43 But the positivist foreclosure of fantasy and fiction from the “real” has the paradoxical effect of empowering fantasy and fiction to establish and secure the boundaries of the “real” itself. In other words, fantasy actually produces the reality that consigns it to the realm of the unreal. Moreover, if fantasy, as theorized by Butler, “establishes the real through a repeated and persistent posturing,” then the real – a phantasmatic and illusory effect like gender – may always be contested and reimagined.44 Put yet another way, and in less theoretical terms, the same poetic genre that gave form to the fantasies of Agathias and Paul is the same verse form that celebrated the glory of public officials, gave elaborate expression to formal praise of the Emperor, and proclaimed the majesty of Christ and the Virgin on the inscribed surfaces of buildings, monuments, and churches throughout Byzantium. If the latter epigrams are to be taken seriously as constituting Byzantine “reality,” then so too must the former, for the illicit fantasies of Eros, Aphrodite, and Dionysus covertly shaped early Byzantine culture as much as Justinian’s wars, a revised legal code, or Christian orthodoxy.45 It’s no wonder, then, that in the epigrams of the Cycle poets, the old gods still live, thriving on the sensual longing of those who imaginatively recreate their world. In the preface to the Cycle, Agathias admits that these divine powers belong to an earlier age, but also that God may nod his assent to such things in song.46 So-called “pagan” poetry flourished throughout the Roman world in late antiquity, and especially in Egypt, which gave birth to the greatest poet of late antiquity, Nonnos of Panopolis, whose mammoth Dionysiaka, composed in the fifth century, was profoundly influential on Agathias and his fellow poets in Constantinople. The Dionysiaka narrates in forty-eight books the exploits of a divine hero notorious for his effeminacy. Dionysus has luxurious hair and lacks crucial masculine attributes: he has no sword and no strength; he has the figure and the mind of a woman; he is Zeus’ “womanish son”; he wears “yellow slippers, women’s purple tunics, and a woman’s girdle around his waist”; and even when he leads an army he is a “womanish chief.” 47 In the poetic imagination of late antiquity, this delicate hero rivaled manly exemplars such as Achilles – who himself spent his youth as a maiden on Skyros – and so when the heirs of Nonnos in the sixth century turned to epigram’s miniature form, their sensual fantasies intensified the poetic mediation between masculine and feminine.
It was probably during his school days in Alexandria that Agathias came into contact with the works of Nonnos and thus developed his passion for Greek poetry; Julian the Egyptian was another Cycle poet. But one didn’t have to be educated in Egypt to learn the rigorous formal demands of late antique poetry, for poets, teachers, and their texts circulated throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the sixth century.48 The emergence of Christianity as a dominant cultural force within the Roman empire did little to curb the tastes of educated audiences who continued to enjoy the mythological poetry that was in vogue during this period.49 Hardly anyone in sixth-century Constantinople would have been willing to identify openly as a practicing pagan: Justinian’s reign was intolerant of those who adhered to the old gods, and the increasing orthodoxy of the Imperial city made the population as a whole hostile to pagan holdouts. There seems nevertheless to have been continuous pagan activity in Asia Minor, and John of Ephesus (Yōh ˙ annān in Syriac), Justinian’s chief investigator into these matters, boasts in his Ecclesiastical History of his own inquisitions and mass conversions in Caria, Phrygia, and Lydia in 545–546. 50 But persecutions against pagans continued even in Constantinople late into Justinian’s reign: in 562, according to John Malalas, “Hellenes who had been arrested were paraded around the altar and their books were burned in the Kynēgion as well as the images and statues of their abominable gods themselves.” 51 But despite this outburst in which even artifacts of pagan culture were targeted for destruction, there was a distinction between pagan religious practice and the classical culture that persisted everywhere in late antiquity. A citizen of Constantinople who regularly participated in the liturgy in Hagia Sophia may also on the same day have enjoyed a pantomime performance of the myth of Hippolytus, and this is to say nothing of the representations of the old gods in classical art throughout the Imperial city. But even classical culture was sometimes under suspicion in the sixth century, as the above quotation from Malalas indicates, and in one of his hymns Romanos the Melode caricatures “Hellenes” who love classical learning as puffed up and bombastic.
With deft word play the Christian poet ridicules those who “wander to Plato” (πλανῶνται πρὸς Πλάτωνα), while Homer is an “idle dream” (Ὅμηρον ὄνειρον ἀργόν), and Demosthenes “has no power” (Δημοσθένην ... τὸν ἀσθενῆ).52 Even as the old myths and legends continued to be meaningful to the culture at large, this kind of propaganda from the pulpit effectively cultivated hostility toward classical learning and literature. Alan Cameron recently revisited the question of the survival of paganism in sixth-century Byzantium in an essay responding to the work of Anthony Kaldellis, who in a series of publications has proposed that there was in Constantinople under Justinian a community of intellectual dissidents, including Agathias.53 Cameron interprets Kaldellis to mean that such men were indeed “pagans,” and so he argues systematically and combatively that all of Kaldellis’ dissidents were in fact Christians whose interest in pagan culture was typical of aesthetic and intellectual currents of the age. I agree with Cameron’s essential point that the issue at hand is the survival of pagan culture and not the pagan identity of various members of the intellectual elite. Kaldellis, for his part, has since responded that criticisms such as those expressed by Cameron – insisting on the Christian identity of sixth-century intellectuals – reveal a powerful bias within late antique and early Byzantine studies. “It turns out, after all,” writes Kaldellis, “that there is little room for genuine intellectual difference and idiosyncracy: there are only pagans and Christians ... By insisting on firm identities, the field reveals its priorities, which do not include unaffiliated intellectual ‘fluidity.’”54 Kaldellis himself, then, rejects the binary labeling of sixthcentury intellectuals as either “pagans” or “Christians.” But some Christian writers during this period did loudly oppose adherence to classical culture, and I think that Cameron oversimplifies matters when he says that the negative outlook of devout Christians such as John of Ephesus and, for that matter, Romanos the Melode represent “an extremist, minority view, in all probability not even shared by Justinian himself.” 55 Adherence to classical – that is, “pagan” – forms of literary expression, even if apparently benign, could make even some of the more relaxed moralists suspicious of worldly sensuality: the salvation of Christian souls was at stake.
This mentality created seemingly firm divisions in the work of the early Byzantine poets themselves. Nonnos, for example, famously authored not only his luxuriant Dionysiaka but also a hexameter Paraphrase of the Gospel of John: Christ and Dionysus dwell in different poems and, by implication, different worlds. In the sixth century, I have already noted how Agathias (whether defensively or confidently) feels that he must explain his circle’s choice to compose dedicatory epigrams “as if to the older gods” (AP 4.4.69) or that God may nod assent to such things in song (76–77). Alan Cameron offers the defensive interpretation, supposing that Agathias must have included at least a few Christian epigrams in his collection (e.g. AP 1.32–36) as a means of insulating himself from potential suspicion that his anthology was too pagan.56 Barry Baldwin thinks otherwise and wonders why there is “not even a hint of Christian content” in Agathias’ description of the contents to the Cycle or in the Histories; instead, Agathias “obtrudes pagan hellenism into both ... This is the voice of a confident classicism, not a defensive one.” 57 Paul Silentiarios, on the other hand, delivered his grandiose Ekphrasis of Hagia Sophia in public on the Feast of the Epiphany in 563, but his songs of Aphrodite flew beneath the radar: Agathias says that at the time when he collected his circle’s epigrams for publication in the Cycle, the poems were “still escaping notice and indiscriminately thus were being whispered softly in some people’s houses” (Hist. pr. 8). Perhaps Agathias felt comfortable publishing these heretofore scandalous epigrams because Justin II and Sophia were more accepting of such explicitly sensuous classicism. The bottom line, though, is that the division between Christian poetry and the poetry of the classical Muses was a division that mattered to the poets of the Cycle.
But this artificial and self-imposed division doesn’t hold up to scrutiny when we read the poems themselves,58 for Christ lives in the early Byzantine poetry of Eros, Aphrodite, and Dionysus, just as the sensuous pagan gods live in the poetry of Christ. Robert Shorrock, in The Myth of Paganism: Nonnus, Dionysus and the World of Late Antiquity, admirably demonstrates the productive “interconnectedness” of the Dionysiaka and the Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, in both of which readers are continually motivated “to see one image or object in the light of another: at times Christ may resemble Dionysus and Dionysus may resemble Christ,” such that the Christian savior is imbued with as much sensuality as his pagan counterpart.59 Shorrock’s reading of the Nonnian corpus reflects larger trends in the writing of late antiquity, when holiness and asceticism became ineluctably tied to materiality and embodiment. In The Sex Lives of the Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography, Virginia Burrus offers an exhilarating revisionist interpretation of Christian hagiography as a queerly hybrid genre that depicts in the ascetic Life not an attenuation but an intensification of the sensual and the erotic, a “countererotics” that seeks transcendence by means of an “agonizing pleasure.” 60 Derek Krueger in Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East likewise sees in late antique hagiography a paradoxical “victory of the body,” for, as he puts it, “The model for subverting the body/spirit opposition is in the sanctification of matter itself. This is the difference incarnation makes, not only for its explicit revaluing of the body but also for framing the subsequent production of the logos.” 61
As a critical nexus for negotiating the place of sensuality and erōs in early Byzantine culture, the epigrammatic fantasies of the Cycle poets – like the hagiographic texts of the period – are caught up in the mutually energizing relationship between holiness and embodiment. Paul’s epigram on the unrepentant harlot, as I argued above, engages in an intertextual relationship with Romanos’ hymn that only intensifies the harlot’s transgressive joy in her promiscuity. Agathias’ erotic poetry, too, fully reflects the ascetic tendency that so shaped the culture of early Byzantium but acquires its piquancy by means of its flirtation with the illicit. In an important essay on a body of work that he described as both erotic and ascetic, R. C. McCail long ago recognized that of all Agathias’ epigrams, “not one of them treats of consummated love”; unlike the other poets of the Cycle, Agathias “keeps his distance, observing the harlot’s just or unjust deserts, humbled by his mistress, fruitlessly longing, declining the prize when it is in his grasp.” 62
Agathias’ lover thus denies pleasure as if he were Jerome’s Malchus or Hilarion, whose Lives are, on Burrus’ astute reading, saturated with erotic subtext.63 Denial itself is, after all, an incitement to pleasure, and so it’s not surprising that, just as his erotic poetry is suffused with ascetic impulses, so too does Agathias’ explicitly Christian poetry come off as indulgently sensual. Winged Eros binds himself to the body of the ascetic, and vice versa. Here is an epigram that Agathias composed to accompany an icon of the archangel Michael that was set up on the island of Plate (modern Yassıada) in the Sea of Marmara: Ἄσκοπον ἀγγελίαρχον ἀσώματον εἴδεϊ μορφῆς, ἆ μέγα τολμήεις, κηρὸς ἀπεπλάσατο. ἔμπης οὐκ ἀχάριστον, ἐπεὶ βροτὸς εἰκόνα λεύσσων θυμὸν ἀπιθύνει κρέσσονι φαντασίῃ· οὐκέτι δ’ ἀλλοπρόσαλλον ἔχει σέβας, ἀλλ’ ἐν ἑαυτῷ τὸν τύπον ἐγγράψας ὡς παρεόντα τρέμει· ὄμματα δ’ ὀτρύνουσι βαθὺν νόον· οἶδε δὲ τέχνη χρώμασι πορθμεῦσαι τὴν φρενὸς ἱκεσίην. (AP 1.34 Agathias) An archangel not to be seen, incorporeal in the appearance of form – ah, how greatly daring! – did the wax mold. Nevertheless, it is not unfavorable when a man who looks at the icon directs his heart to a greater imagine in the mind (φαντασίῃ). And he no longer has reverence that leans now this way, now that way, but having inscribed in himself the impression, he trembles (τρέμει) as though he [the angel] were present. And the eyes arouse the depth of the mind. And art knows how by means of color to carry over the heart’s prayer. The epigram is notable as an early defense of icons within the spiritual life of Byzantium, for the potentially blasphemous depiction of a supernatural power whose nature is essentially formless becomes instead an instrument of piety.64 Activated by the gaze of the viewer, the icon creates an impression in the soul that awakens intellectual depth and provides access to a greater image in the mind (φαντασίη) such that the viewer trembles (τρέμει) in the belief that the archangel is actually present to receive his prayer.65 Agathias’ pious epigram on the Christian icon sublimates the intense carnality of sexual longing, an interpretation that is borne out by comparison with an erotic poem by Agathias’ friend Makedonios: Ἦλθες ἐμοὶ ποθέοντι παρ’ ἐλπίδα· τὴν δ’ ἐνὶ θυμῷ ἐξεσάλαξας ὅλην θάμβεϊ φαντασίην καὶ τρομέω· κραδίη τε βυθῷ πελεμίζεται οἴστρου, ψυχῆς πνιγομένης κύματι Κυπριδίῳ. ἀλλ’ ἐμὲ τὸν ναυηγὸν ἐπ’ ἠπείροιο φανέντα σῶε τεῶν λιμένων ἔνδοθι δεξαμένη. (AP 5.235 Makedonios) You came to me as I was longing past expectation. And you violently shook the entire image in my mind (φαντασίην) in my amazement and I’m trembling (τρομέω). And my heart quivers from the depth of a stinging desire, while my soul drowns in a wave of Kypris. But since I have appeared on dry land as a shipwrecked man, save me by receiving me inside your harbor. The woman’s unexpected appearance confounds the lover who has been longing for her: he thought that he had to content himself with the fantasy of her – the φαντασίη, the image of her that he held in his mind – but her presence banishes the fantasy and he now shudders in her presence.66
The lover’s desire consumes him, and he feels like he is drowning in Aphrodite’s surging waves, but with his beloved’s arrival, he has made it to shore where the landscape of the metaphorical harbor titillatingly mimics the landscape of the woman’s receptive body. Aglae Pizzone, in her sensitive reading of these two poems, stresses Agathias’ redirection of “the affecting power of the gaze ... toward spiritual love,” 67 but it’s just as important to trace out the carnal eroticism that persists in the epigram on the icon. Just as Makedonios’ lover trembles (τρομέω) in sexual excitement at the epiphany of his beloved, so too does the fantasy (φαντασίη) of the archangel’s presence suffice to produce in the pious viewer the same physical trembling (τρέμει). There is even a hint of scandal in the icon’s ability to harness the viewer’s reverence, which no longer “leans now this way, now that way” (ἀλλοπρόσαλλον): improperly focused, the mind of the pious wanders like the mind of Paul’s unrepentant harlot, promiscuously distracted by thoughts of multiple men. Sublimation does not eradicate the carnality of longing, for as Burrus has shown, ascetic erōs is really just “an intensification of the movements of displacement and deferral that are inherent in all desire.” 68
Ivan Drpič has proposed moreover that pothos, which often takes the form of erotic passion, is critical for understanding Byzantine religious thought. For Drpič, pothos expresses “the need for intimacy with a superior being that remains frustratingly elusive, distant from the devotee’s earthly existence yet ostensibly involved in his or her life, simultaneously absent and present.” 69 Though Drpič’s study focuses on later Byzantium, his main thesis about the centrality of pothos in Byzantine religious thought holds true also for the sixth century. I would add, though, that the poets of Agathias’ circle remain in this earlier period passionate about making the most of the “earthly existence” of their devotion, for they are not ready to let go completely of the carnality of their longing. Their classical paideia and the genre of Greek epigram offer these poets a medium to revel in the possibilities that their passage to the divine may be smeared with the scandal of sensual pleasure. Like the Christian icon, the epigrams of the Cycle poets produce fantasies – phantasiai, images in the mind – that simultaneously defer the gratification of desires even as they make them appear tantalizingly present.
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