meretricula | so about those Roman slave AUs we like so much...

well, I guess most people who read this know that I'm a classics student (with a creepy fascination with the way sex is presented in classical poetry, hurr). I'm currently reading this book called One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, which is a collection of essays by David Halperin, and I have to say that, one essay in, it is already challenging a lot of my assumptions about the way sex worked in the cultures I'm studying. I mean, sex is not ever just sex to the ancient Greeks and Romans. it is a reaffirmation of a very hierarchical, patriarchal social system. any sex that fails to reaffirm this system is not just unconventional, but anathema. it's hard to wrap your brain around the concept that there is no such thing as love between equals in the vocabulary of classics. I guess it's just so ingrained as a romantic ideal in our time that visualizing a culture where it literally doesn't exist is really difficult. it's important not to overlay our cultural values on the ones we're studying, but still, it's just so weird to think about! oral sex was the most obscene, disgusting act imaginable in the ancient world. the penetrative or active partner in a sexual act probably didn't give a fuck about reciprocating or making sure his (and it's nearly always "his") partner had a good time. and he also didn't define himself in terms of whether he was fucking a man or a woman. the analogy Halperin used was for food: some people prefer white meat, and some people prefer dark meat, but they're still eating meat and we as a culture don't really assign any deeper meaning to that preference; it's just personal taste. some guy in ancient Athens choosing to fuck a dude or a lady was on par with asking for breast or drumstick (lol alarmingly apt terminology) at dinner now.

so I guess my point is that when we try to situate a romance in ancient Greece or Rome (don't lie, I know you've read a gladiator AU at some point in your life), there are all these other elements present that tend to get overlooked. how can we tell a love story set in this world where there is no such thing as love in the way we conceive of it? I don't mean that people didn't fall in love. I mean, come on, read Catullus: he hated Lesbia way too much not to have loved her too. (and even if you read Catullus-the-character as a fictional construct in the poetry of Catullus-the-author, the fact that he thought those emotions were worth writing about means that they must have been part of his culture's experience.) I mean that there are so many social constraints that we don't think about now that seem to completely derail our idea of a happy ending. but then people really were happy in relationships then too, I think. so maybe I'm still trying to apply my values instead of learning the values of the setting. but I think that the "happy ending" of the ancient Greeks and Romans wouldn't be very satisfying to a modern reader. Mary Renault and Georgette Heyer are two of my absolute favorite authors of all time, for instance, and they're both demons for historical accuracy, but I've never felt the OMGHAPPYSQUEEFLAIL!!!1!!1! of a Heyer happy ending in a Renault novel. "and then I married my dead boyfriend's wife and took care of her for the rest of our days" just doesn't hit me in whatever part of the brain that "and then we were wed and lived out our days as members of the wealthy landed aristocracy, helping raise her younger siblings and/or our children in the countryside and getting fat and old together" does, even though I think they're both valid expressions of the same emotion, given the time periods in question.

...now my brain hurts. maybe I should just try to read this book before I think more about it.

and while we're on the subject of AUs, have a tiny tiny snippet of a Rafa/Nole scenario that's been eating my brain for a while now:

Novak dropped into his chair with a nearly inaudible sigh and immediately began unpacking. "Pencil, pencil, fuck," he muttered, digging through his case. He wasn't late - actually, he was one of the first people on the stage, aside from Janko, who had to come in early to wheel out the timpani and get the rest of the percussion set arranged the way he liked it - but they had a new conductor this semester and he wanted to make a good impression. And in Novak's experience, nothing pissed off conductors as much as musicians who forgot to bring a pencil to rehearsal.

"Here," someone said from behind him, and a pencil materialized on Novak's stand. Novak jumped and only barely managed not to drop his bow or his viola as he spun around. "Hi," Rafa said, smiling and tan and still every bit as unfairly good-looking as he'd been before summer break. "I have an extra. You can keep."

"Thanks," Novak got out. He could feel his face going tomato-red. "Um, so how was your summer?" he added, as Rafa picked his way through the chairs and stands to get to the cello section. "Your uncle keep you locked up in a closet practicing for ten hours every day?"

"How you know that?" Rafa asked, looking over at him with wide eyes. Novak gaped at him, horrified, until Rafa let out an amused noise that could sort of be characterized as snort. "Is a joke, Nole."

"I knew that," Novak said defensively. Rafa snort-laughed again, and he gave up. "Well, your uncle is crazy, so I wouldn't be surprised, that's all."

"I have very nice summer," Rafa said. "I swim, I fish, I golf. I only practice six hours a day. Is vacation."

"You're a jerk," Novak replied without rancor. "A practice-obsessed jerk. And you make the rest of us look bad."

"Nobody ever can make you look bad," Rafa said with apparent sincerity. Novak blushed again.

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tyrannicides.livejournal.com

Hello, I am commenting creepily quickly because I am trying to write but it isn't happening so I keep refreshing my flist like LET'S SEE WHAT'S GOING ON

Anyways, this post. <3

the penetrative or active partner in a sexual act probably didn't give a fuck about reciprocating or making sure his (and it's nearly always "his") partner had a good time. and he also didn't define himself in terms of whether he was fucking a man or a woman.

This is definitely beyond true for the Romans. I wrote a paper on this shit. Not that that makes me somehow qualified to talk about it, really, but yeah. Caesar the queen, haaaa.

But expanding to the Greeks: their relationships with women were like this, definitely. But the erastes/eromenos relationship seems to defy a lot of the conventions. There's all kinds of teasing about men being totally whipped for these boys--and yeah, the teasing implies that they're not living up to the social standard, but none of it seems mean-spirited. More like, "Oh man, Dikaiopolis is soooo whipped for Diophantos. Whelp, who could blame him. dat ass." The eromenos were courted and could choose who they wanted--and the cockerel & walnut gifts and everything. It isn't love between equals, by definition, and it isn't anything like love in our sense of the word. But I think it's--accessible to the modern person? If there isn't love there, ideally, there's a lot of care and affection and general mutualness. It's kind of paradoxical, that the ancient relationship-type we could potentially relate with the most--at least in terms of reciprocation and devotion and "love"--happens to be the one that everyone freaks out over and generally avoids talking about.

You already know all this and are clearly not contradicting any of it at all in your post, I know, but when you say "classical world", I just thought of that.

But yeah, gladiator AUs are right out, lol. Though I love reading them. So much.

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so about those Roman slave AUs we like so much...

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