cahn | Classics Salon!

So yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.

But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!

My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.

Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)

(This is not supposed to be just for

mildred_of_midgard and

selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )

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From:

selenak

Speaking of you as a Latin major: Tom Holland translates a really famous quote differently from all I've seen before. To wit, Nero's last words, "Qualis artifex pereo!", which usually get translated as "what an artist perishes with me!", whereas Holland's take is "That I should die a mere artisan!"

Your judgment?

Speaking of Nero, the ending of the Nero biography is an illustration of two contradictory traditions being used. The Octavia mentioned is Nero's first wife whom he had killed.

He died aged thirty-one, on the anniversary of Octavia's death, and such was the public rejoicing that the plebs ran all aobut the city wearing caps of the kind that are given to slaves when they are granted their freedom. Netherheless, for a long time, there was no lack of people to decorate his tomb with spring and summer flowers, and sometimes they would bring a statue of him out on to the Rostra arrayed in a toga, and sometimes post his edicts as if he were still alive, and would be returning imminently to visit an awful vengeance upon his foes. Even the ambassadors of Vologases, the king of the Parthians, when they appeared before the senate to renew their alliance, made an earnest request as well that the memory of Nero be honoured. In fact, twenty years later, when I myself was a young man, a person emerged from nowhere to claim, with much song and dance, that he was Nero: a name that still had such resonance among the Parthians that they gave the impostor their enthusiastic backing, and could only with difficulty be persuaded to surrender him.

Now this is a bit easier to reconcile than the Tiberius and Julia stuff, because Nero being popular in the provinces and unpopular in the capital could be explained by him being a Graecophile and the city-Romans being first hand witnesses to his increasing evilness in the way you just weren't when living somewhere in the Middle East. But clearly the people bringing flowers to the tomb of a disgraced Emperor in the reigns of Emperors presenting him as scum had to be living in Rome itself. Rosy glasses looking backwards because you have issues with the Flavians, maybe? Nero wronged?

Romans and m/m between adults: like I said, I did know about this attitude, but reading example after example at book length was something else again!

(If and when I ever get around to reading Cicero's Philipicca against Antony at full length, I'll probably have a deja vue, because even in the excerpts, I recall examples of: Antony, you did *corrupt thing* and also *corrupt thing* AND you had sex with your pal Curio even when you two were adults AND you let him top you!"

Edited Date: 2025-12-16 10:26 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

To wit, Nero's last words, "Qualis artifex pereo!", which usually get translated as "what an artist perishes with me!", whereas Holland's take is "That I should die a mere artisan!"

Your judgment?

The first one feels more obvious to me, but the second one seems possible. To make an informed judgment, I would want to take a look at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and see how the two operative words get used elsewhere.

Had I but world enough and time, this is the exact kind of thing I would enjoy.

(If and when I ever get around to reading Cicero's Philipicca against Antony at full length, I'll probably have a deja vue, because even in the excerpts, I recall examples of: Antony, you did *corrupt thing* and also *corrupt thing* AND you had sex with your pal Curio even when you two were adults AND you let him top you!"

If you do Cicero's Philippics for salon, I should do Demosthenes' Philippics in combo with Aeschines. Aeschines' Kata Timarkhou centers on the argument that Timarkhus was unfit for public affairs (and, more specifically, to sue Aeschines) because he sold his body for sex* and (quelle horreur) let men top him as an adult!

* I mean, admittedly this would be a PR problem for a modern-day politician, too.

From:

cahn

I feel like I could imagine a divided populace?

Romans and m/m between adults: like I said, I did know about this attitude, but reading example after example at book length was something else again!

Yeah, this was actually something I did know about, I forget why -- possibly just osmosis from, like, being Greek fandom-adjacent, possibly stuff like discussing the Hadrian opera even though I still haven't watched it yet. But it's just so alien to my twenty-first-century I-literally-have-to-take-sexual-harassment-courses-every-two-years-about-not-engaging-in-power-differential-relationships viewpoint that I can't wrap my head around it in an actual example, even though I know it was a thing.

From:

selenak

The consent question for Romans really comes into play when we’re talking about a) free born citizens, and b) one of them not married to another. (If you’re having non-consensual sex with someone else’s slave, that’s not bad because of consent and power differential, it’s bad because you’re damaging someone else’s property.) That said, if bringing up charges against corrupt governors, which is something young noble Romans loved to do as a step in their career because you can make a big legal splash that way (not just Cicero but Caesar did it), “he raped people!” Does get frequently mentioned.

I forgot to say that Tom Holland in his preface points out that “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are not categories the Romans think in. When Suetonius notes that Claudius had only ever had sex with women, or later that Vitellius only was into men, that gets listed among other preferences and is given no more weight than “he only preferred blondes” . The scandal with m/m is only if you, a Roman adult man, let another man top you, not because you’re having sex with a male person, basically. So in this fandom really everyone except a few is bi. But gay utopia, this decidedly is not.

You may recall in the Odyssey, there is this interesting bit where Eurykleia, lauding Laertes, says he never shamed his wife by having sex with her, Eurykleia (i.e. a female slave), and it’s also pointed out that Telemachus never embarassed his mother by having sex with any slaves, either. So collapsing Bronze Age Greeks or whenever this epic was written down do have the understanding that you, a Greek man, should not have sex with slaves (of any age) - though not for our reasons. It’s because the lady of the household, no matter whether she’s your wife or mother, objects to it.

Now generally policing sex lives was something the Roman state didn’t do UNTIL Augustus came up with the Julian laws (which were later used against his daughter and granddaughter), which all of a sudden moved it out of the family sphere to the public sphere and made adultery a crime. (In theory for both women and men, but in practice, behold the cases of the two Julias: Julia the elder: exiled. Of the five men accused of having had sex with Julia (I, Claudius not withstanding, there were “only” five), the sole guy getting executed just happened to be Marc Antony’s sole surviving son (from Antony’s marriage to Fulvia; the older of Fulvia’s boys was already killed together with Caesarion when Octavian had defeated Antony and Cleopatra, but the younger was still a child at the time and living with Octavia, Octavian’s sister). Julia the younger’s case is even weirder, because it was her supposed lover who got just a slap on the wrist in the form of being banished to Massilia (Marseille), as opposed to being stuck on a small island like the two Julias, whereas her husband got killed. (Because he hadn’t denounced Julia.)

It didn’t take Roman women that long before finding a get out clause from the Julian laws, btw, because in the reign of Tiberius, there was a big influx of Roman noblewomen officially registering themselves as prostitutes. Why? Because that meant any non marital sexual relationship could be defended by them just doing their job. (The sudden influx of registration happened after a lawyer defending a lady actually won his case with that excuse.) The Julian laws were never popular, and so this went on until the time of the Flavians, when Domitian (who was another Emperor swearing to restore public morality when he came into office) shut that legal loophole down. This is something Suetonius puts in the good column, whereas he thinks the fact Domitian couldn’t bear divoricing his openly adulterous wife (as mentioned by Feuchtwanger, he did send her briefly to the island Pandataria where the older Julia had been exiled to, but called her back because he couldn’t be without her) is a very very bad thing as opposed to one of the things humanizing Domitian.

It’s also interesting what you can read between the lines. Because as mentioned in both the Augustus and the Tiberius biography, when Augustus condemned his daughter Julia and sent her to Pandataria, a lot of people protested and kept petitioning him for years and years to recall her, only for him to reprove them and tell all who asked for mercy he wished they had daughters and wives like Julia. (Augustus did eventually permit Julia to move from Pandataria to a small town on the Italian mainland, but when Tiberius became Emperor, she was confined within a house in that town and eventually starved to death within a year of his ascension.) Now while presumably that factoid is included to show that Augustus is acting like a true Brutus the Elder style Roman (this Brutus, the ancestor of the one who killed Caesar, was the guy who according to Livy condemned his own sons to death for betraying the new Republic), putting the public welfare and the law above all, but what it actually shows that laws making adultery criminal were NOT seen as something popular by the Romans. Oh, and that Julia herself was popular. Another historian describes her as kind, witty and generous. Bear in mind it was apparantly public knowledge in Rome, according to the same Suetonius biography, that Augustus was not faithful to his wife and kept deflowering those virgins, and you can see why even given different standards for men and women all this supposed concern for public morality forcing him to banish his daughter was a bit hard to swallow.

(This is also rich meat for conspiracy theories along the lines of: was the true reason for Julia’s exile not adultery at all but the fact she had a thing with Marc Antony’s sole surviving son and Augustus was concerned about Julus Antonius eventually either reviving the civil wars or making a play for the succession? Because all three men whom Augustus had married Julia to had been signalled to be his likely successor by the fact of that marriage - his nephew Marcellus (who died when he and Julia were still teens), his right hand man Agrippa (who was the father of her five surviving kids), and after Agrippa’s death, Tiberius. If in theory Julia had divorced Tiberius and married Julus Antonius…)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I forgot to say that Tom Holland in his preface points out that “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are not categories the Romans think in.

The (a?) seminal work on the subject of homosexuality as a category is Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. I haven't read it since college so can't really comment, but it was probably the most-cited book I came across when I was researching the subject.

So collapsing Bronze Age Greeks or whenever this epic was written down do have the understanding that you, a Greek man, should not have sex with slaves (of any age) - though not for our reasons. It’s because the lady of the household, no matter whether she’s your wife or mother, objects to it.

I wonder if "household" might be the operative word here: historically, adultery laws in different societies have sometimes made a distinction between adultery committed in the home vs. adultery committed outside the home. Agamemnon (who was married but hadn't seen his wife in 10 years) slept with Chryseis and presumably Briseis, Achilles (who was unmarried, and Thetis doesn't seem to object) slept with multiple slaves (of whom Briseis is the most famous), Patroclus (also unmarried) slept with Iphis, and so on and so on.

And definitely, even in the absence of laws, women have reacted differently based on where the adultery takes place, and whether the illegitimate child becomes part of the household or not.

I'm also reminded that Samuel Butler thought the Odyssey was composed by a woman, and plenty of scholars are still willing to entertain the idea... I could definitely see a female poet deciding that men who honor the dominant female's wishes are to be praised!

Now generally policing sex lives was something the Roman state didn’t do UNTIL Augustus came up with the Julian laws (which were later used against his daughter and granddaughter), which all of a sudden moved it out of the family sphere to the public sphere and made adultery a crime.

Which, Cahn, is not to say that adultery was cool prior to this, just that it wasn't a crime that the *state* punished. The husband could absolutely divorce or even kill his unfaithful wife, while the wife had to just suck it up if her husband cheated on her. He could also sue the man she had slept with for damages (because, as Selena said, this was a violation of his property rights).

The Romans were pretty hardcore when it came to granting power to the paterfamilias, the (free) male head of a Roman family. He could even sell his kids into slavery, up to, I forget if it was 2 or 3 times. A surprising number of times, anyway!

From:

selenak

I wonder if "household" might be the operative word here: historically, adultery laws in different societies have sometimes made a distinction between adultery committed in the home vs. adultery committed outside the home

Probably. In addition to all the examples of Greek heroes having sex with slaves without the narrative presenting this as bad in the Iliad (what's problematic is Agamemnon taking Achilles' war prize from him, because it is an injury to Achilles, not Briseis), there's as mentioned before the fact Odysseus starts his narrative midst-Odyssey about what happened after he left Troy behind with "so first thing we did, me and the guys sacked another little town and had fun killing the men and sharing the women", and that there's no sense of the narrative seeing this as problematic at all, or as contracting his indignant denial of being a pirate later one.

I'm also reminded that Samuel Butler thought the Odyssey was composed by a woman, and plenty of scholars are still willing to entertain the idea... I could definitely see a female poet deciding that men who honor the dominant female's wishes are to be praised!

True. And seeing this as something completely separate from what the men do to other women when they're at war, sad to say.

Which, Cahn, is not to say that adultery was cool prior to this, just that it wasn't a crime that the *state* punished. The husband could absolutely divorce or even kill his unfaithful wife, while the wife had to just suck it up if her husband cheated on her.

Well, almost, depending on which of the three Roman ways the couple was married. Because in the most popular one, she was technically still a member of her father's household, not her husband's household, meaning her father could if he was on her side divorce the husband and keep her material goods. But again, that entirely depended on the father.* Until Augustus made it a business of the state. (This, btw, is also how he justified executing his granddaughter's husband but not her lover, because according to the new laws, husbands who didn't denounce their wives if they discovered adultery made themselves fellow criminals. (Mind you, how far the Julian laws were really practiced outside the Roman upper class, especially the Imperial family, is questionable, and within the Imperial family, is questionable, given all the complaints by poets and satirists and historians about shameless unfaithful women.

*Trying to think of an example of a father siding with his daughter in a divorce case pre Augustus - Cicero with Tullia? Not sure, will have to look it up.

From:

cahn

I forgot to say that Tom Holland in his preface points out that “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are not categories the Romans think in.

Oh, this really is new to me -- I guess I had the vague idea that Romans had to be heterosexual because, like, having kids and stuff, and then homosexual for fun, so that there was a difference there.

whereas her husband got killed. (Because he hadn’t denounced Julia.)

Whoa!

but when Tiberius became Emperor, she was confined within a house in that town and eventually starved to death within a year of his ascension.

omg, poor Julia :(

but what it actually shows that laws making adultery criminal were NOT seen as something popular by the Romans. Oh, and that Julia herself was popular.

Ah, this is great, thanks for explaining this!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

But it's just so alien to my twenty-first-century I-literally-have-to-take-sexual-harassment-courses-every-two-years-about-not-engaging-in-power-differential-relationships viewpoint that I can't wrap my head around it in an actual example, even though I know it was a thing.

I think what happened to me is that homosexuality was barely on my radar until around the time I started majoring in Classics, so the first mental categories around the subject that I really developed were strongly influenced by immersion in the study of ancient Greece, and everything else came later. I still have to periodically remind myself that normal people have one set of dominant concepts, which they derived from the modern world, and that these concepts (for better and for worse) seem self-evident to them.