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[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

The thing with this: Sappho wrote wedding songs. The epithalamium was a traditional part of Greek lyric poetry, and doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the poet’s own subjectivity. Whatever’s “hetero” in her corpus comes in the context of either the epithalamium or the voice of a secondary character.

Sappho probably had a husband (his name probably wasn’t Cercylas of Andros, because that’s most likely a byzantine misreading of a joke from Attic comedy). Aristocratic women back in the day wouldn’t have had much of a choice about having said husband, regardless of desire or otherwise. Marriage in antiquity = the exchange of women between men for the benefit of the perpetuation of aristocratic lineage and the transfer of property along desirable lines.

Based on what we have of her poetry and what we know of her social context, calling Sappho bi without qualification is.... otiose. Calling her a lesbian is probably also otiose for many reasons, but the fact is that whatever of her fragments are written in her own voice are addressed to women and surround women with erotic intensity and conventional lyric tropes of love and desire. The fact of it is that we can’t ever know what kind of people Sappho liked to fuck, and that, *especially* in the case of female/female desire, our categories SUPER don’t work when forced upon antiquity in this way.

Bi erasure is real, and it’s balls. But a slightly more nuanced conception of Sappho’s poetry would be salutary here. Folks can claim Sappho for all kinds of things, but what they really ought to do is read her poetry. There’s precious little of it. Take it in. Soak it up. Read her words.

achilles is so often called gay by the community and straight by society even though he fell in love with men and women. freddie mercury is known as the most famous gay man even though he self identified as bisexual. channing tatum is constantly called straight even though he’s dated men and women. evan rachel wood and angelina jolie and drew barrymore–all self identified bi women constantly called straight.

sappho wrote love poems for both men and women and yalls response to the idea that she might have been bi is “there was no concept of bi/gay back then!! let’s focus on the fact that she was sapphic!!” to the point where her name has become synonymous with gay and she’s called a lesbian icon and y'all only seem to have issues with “concepts” and labels when the concept/label is BI. why am i not surprised?

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

Full offense, but butchness has absolutely nothing to do with men. At all. Butches aren’t defined by any comparison to men, nor are they defined by any comparison to society’s cishet ideas of “masculinity”.

It’s not about the separation of (our society’s cishet conceptions of) “masculinity” vs. “femininity”. It��s not about “masculine women”. It’s not about “women who want to ‘be’ men”. It’s not about men.

It’s about women’s reclamation of “womanhood” and “what it means to be a woman” from a cishet dominated society’s ideals and conceptions of those very things. Its about non-conforming for reasons such as comfort, happiness, communication, and freedom of personal expression. 

It is about women, and their love for other women. Period.

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

This is precisely how scholars bang on about *THE BLATANTLY QUEER AF* goddess Artemis-Diana.

*writes I LIKE GIRLS on every other page of my journals so future historians don’t try to insist that I’m straight”

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

In addition to reading the Iliad, I do dearly wish more folks were familiar with Statius’ *Achilleid*, in which Achilles is nothing if not a “pretty blond teen”: he’s able to live amongst the girls of Lycomedes, disguised as a woman, for months at a time. This is an old story, and Statius takes the raw mythical material and overlays Romanized gender-fuckery. Tender little boy he is: wild-haired, pouty, ill-fitted to civilized graces, but still soft and sexy, a combo of athleticism and adolescent malleability. Statius’ Achilles is an Amazon, a boy who looks like a girl who looks like a boy who’s desired by a girl, Deidamia. Epic poetry and erotic poetry have a strange and close kinship, and Romans, avid fanfic writers they were, bring them into closer and closer relation. Homer’s Achilles mightn’t be delicate, but Statius’ certainly was. Also, Statius is the first extant author to even *mention* the Achilles’ heel story. It more than likely precedes him, but it ain’t in the extant Greek epic material. My boy needs moar love.

Read the fucking Iliad. Pretty please.

I love the fandom of ‘The song of Achilles’, or in general anyone who ships Patrochilles, ok? Like, if you so much as utter the name ‘Achilles’ or ‘Patroclus’ or, hell, even 'Agamemnon’ in front of me I’ll instantly consider you my friend. Just thinking about the fact that there are other people out there who appreciate the classics makes me happier than a kid on his birthday. But sometimes it SHOCKS me how little people really know about them. Maybe you’re a fan of Percy Jackson, or just casually passing by and happened to get interested. And I KNOW there is actually no canon, since these are stories that have been written thousands of times and were around for generations and generations long before that. But it breaks my little warmongering heart to see people that are genuine fans, and really into the characters and stories, and yet there is SO MUCH MORE they could know and don’t. Every time people talk about their Patroclus headcanon of him being a sweet cinnamon roll I want to yell at them: “Your headcanon is fantastic, and beautiful and sweet but DID YOU KNOW that in the Iliad Patroclus is actually the second strongest man of the Myrmidons and slaughters dozens of warriors before it takes FUCKING APOLLO’s intervention to stop him?” There are so many other possibilities, so many other roads that the ancient tried while you know nothing about it. They were the first fanfiction writers, the first shippers, so you might as well lern from the best. If after discovering that Homer’s Achilles was not exactly a feminine and delicate boy you decide you don’t like that, and that a pretty blond teen suits you better than a bloodthirsty warrior, I can very well respect that, and might even agree with you. But if you never read these masterpieces you’ll never know what you’re missing out on.

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

Because you are well aware of your own charm, you become arrogant, and sell your embraces rather than giving them freely. What is the purpose of those curled locks, the countenance smeared with makeup, the sulky wantonness of your eyes; what is the purpose of that refined gait, not a step out of place, except that you are putting your beauty on display in order to sell it? ... As it happens, when you confess that you are a lowly slave, you incite the desire of someone who is on fire for you. You know, there are some women who lust after disreputable sorts, and they don't get turned on unless they're looking at slaves or high-girt servants. The arena gets some of them hot; others are into mule-drivers covered in dust, or actors disgraced by the ostentation of the stage. My mistress is like that; she leaps right back fourteen rows from the orchestra, and looks for something to love amongst the dregs of the people.

Petronius, Satyrica. A speech of a slave girl, addressed at the protagonist Encolpius, whose appearance suddenly comes into the focus for the reader. This man, who had been measuring himself, at times at least, by Roman aristocratic standards - this man was a soft, sulky, sexy, primped ‘n’ preening lil femme all along. And the slave girl’s mistress, Circe, lusts after rough trade, gets hot for whores, for slaves, gladiators and sexy actors. Circe wants to kiss the scars, but she also wants to inflict them, in a potent combination of fetishism and sadism. 

Misogyny, perhaps. The vicious stereotype of the lust-driven aristocratic sadist. But there’s an economy of desire undergirding this speech, one that aristocratic Roman men attempt to defuse by mockery. What aristocratic Roman men fear so terribly is that women don’t want to fuck them. Women want something else. Women aren’t turned on by the orator’s toga; women want the soft man who loves taking it and who dances the pantomime. Underneath the mockery there lies, I think, a fear that *all that will never be good enough*, that performative masculinity will never quite achieve what all those Catos want it to. That’s the fascination of the Romans.

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

Of all things with life and understanding,                                    we women are the most unfortunate.      First, we need a husband, someone we get      for an excessive price. He then becomes      the ruler of our bodies. And this misfortune      adds still more troubles to the grief we have.      Then comes the crucial struggle: this husband      we’ve selected, is he good or bad?                                              For a divorce loses women all respect,      yet we can’t refuse to take a husband.      Then, when she goes into her husband’s home,      with its new rules and different customs,      she needs a prophet’s skill to sort out the man      whose bed she shares. She can’t learn that at home.                             Once we’ve worked hard at this, and with success,      our husband accepts the marriage yoke      and lives in peace—an enviable life.      But if the marriage doesn’t work, then death                          is much to be preferred. When the man tires      of the company he keeps at home, he leaves,      seeking relief for his distress elsewhere,      outside the home. He gets his satisfaction      with some male friend or someone his own age.      We women have to look at just one man.      Men tell us we live safe and secure at home,      while they must go to battle with their spears.      How stupid they are! I’d rather stand there      three times in battle holding up my shield                              than give birth once.

Euripides, Medea, 431 BCE (trans. Ian Johnston). No matter how much one knows about Classical Athenian misogyny and its brutal depths, no matter how many times one side-eyes Euripides for the things he does to women and has women do, there’s nothing in classical literature, full stop, that’s anything like this speech, in which Medea - a woman given voice by a man, a male playwright, a male actor - lays out with shattering clarity the double-binds that structure a woman’s existence in a society where she is a token, stripped of agency, stretched in Procrustean fashion between father’s house and husband’s house. Euripides’ Medea ghosts Gayle Rubin’s Traffic in Women.

In some manifestations of the tradition, Medea is an irredeemable evil witch, associated with the uncanny and the divine. Euripides’ Medea is penetratingly human. Of course, Athenian women’s lives were variegated; not everyone was an aristocrat, not everyone *could* become a token, there were untold masses whose comings and goings and affairs and marriages and loves and losses and griefs and desires are forever lost, because they didn’t matter to the literary record, with its skewings, its biases, its generic categories. But despite the complexity of the context, one senses some faint hint of a ghost of a dream of rebellion brewing at the edges of these words.

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

ursa maior, sub specie aeternitatis

She sees everything now. The gliding years, the circling months, the collision of days, the stochastic pile-up mortals call life.

Her father's wolfhood has spanned decades. She liked him better that way - something respectable about a metaphor made literal. She a bear, him a wolf - her bulk would outtop him, but she never met him. Was it his howls she heard all those sleepless, ursine nights, or was it the human in her, shrieking out its spectral last?

a dream from which she would never wake, the jagged shards of the world she lost.

There is nothing she has not seen - there is nothing she will not see. Never again will she feel dewy grass beneath her feet, the tension of a bowstring in her hands, the surge of cold as she plunges her weary head into a waterfall, the embrace of another.

I a huntress, I a mortal, I a nymph, I the beloved of the goddess, I a bear, I a cluster of stars. I the momentary pleasure of a god - in a moment, everything gone.

and now - everything and now - nothing. The heat death of the universe would suck her in, but what could she feel? she feels nothing.

His kiss felt like hers - was hers. What could she possibly suspect? The spear was sharp by her side, a moment and she could have plunged it into his chest - but it was the chest of her goddess, the moment passed her by, and that poison was already inside her, her screams of rage echoing empty groves, never again safe, never again home.

the leaves beneath her, her tears, she hurled her spear at a tree, she tore up the bark, she crushed it in bloodied hands.

she howled - raspier than her father, her throat shredding, and on she howled.

What mortal spear could pierce the chest of a god, the spear she sharpened nightly - a beesting to him, where it had sought the vitals of the fiercest beasts.

Hands she had loved, hands she had held, dragged away from boars' tusks, her sisters stripped her bare - she could have pushed them away, but what did she have not to trust? Her body, swollen with that poison, apt to burst.

The forest floor felt different under paw pads. The horror as her body clawed away from her - dissolved into instinct. Her son, so beautiful her heart would have ached: she saw Diana in him. she was charged with rage, not with fear, rage to tear him up, to feel his guts turn into pulp in her jaws, to rend the god in him, as if godhead were something she could chew.

earth faded away beneath her, the last shred of connection she had to fleshly suffering, as she gnashed her fangs, in vain - the image of the goddess playing before eyes she no longer had.

--

Callisto. My girl.

Callisto's story is not really sexy. It is tragic and horrendous. A moment of sexiness, or many moments of sexiness we never see, and several lifetimes of suffering. And Ovid, in that aestheticizing way of his, generates some kind of sympathy, but with him sympathy and viciously sadistic voyeurism always seem like close pals. As if it were ever the time for wit, Naso: a rape joke is funny because you are clever? I always thought the most radical thing I could do with it was to wrench out the moments of sexiness:

"Just cuz my world, sweet sister, is so fucking goddamn full of rape, does that mean my body must always be a source of pain?"

I'm not so sure these days. But the dream of girls prancing in woods will never die.

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

After Sappho fragments 94 and 96

"I truly wish that I were dead."

Weeping as she left me - again and again she said, "oh, oh how we have suffered Sappho, I don't want to leave you, I don't go willingly"

and so, I said, "go, be happy, remember me - you know how much I adored you, if not, I want you to know, I want you to remember, all that we did, all the good times:

the garlands we wove, after you spent too long on Pinterest, ogling girls in flowing dresses, delicate latter-day nymphs festooned with flowers, floating in some pastoral Elysium you knew was the park around the corner - the way they fell apart in your hands, the way you fell into my arms, the gales of giggles, petals working themselves loose, entangling themselves in your hair, as I followed with my hand brushed them free, settling in the grass gems of yellow and red forgotten as you tackled me to the ground

the perfume you doused yourself in, abusing the free-sample table, sneaking another squirt as Yves-Pierre, the cosmetician from Colorado, fake accent and clouds of cologne, attended to a mink-clad matron, how I backed you into a corner, drew you to me, inhaled the sweet, cloying scent, forbade you from buying it

the dances we danced together, or I danced, as you glared into your gin & tonic resented the four on the floor pounding of last decade's greatest hits, the press of bodies around you, you snuck me out for a cigarette, kissed me with smoky lips, stole me away into the night, mist settling on the streets, listless trickle of rain, teenagers yowling

and on soft beds, posturepedic, your first real adult purchase, you said, you pushed me back, you damned every consequence yet to come

and I want you to remember, when you smile, there's a glow like the full moon as it battles with city lights, glint dances over metal and glass, cars on the bypass and lawyers' condos -

smile, and she will be yours, and Sappho of Lesbos the ghost of a memory."

she wept, and the tinny voice through speakers distantly hissed out final boarding call as dregs of long-forgotten coffee clung cold to the bottom of her Starbucks cup, crushed tight in one hand, the other on mine, tracing fingers callused by the lyre, detritus of travel, unfilled departure card crumpled.

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

This gives me life.  A survey of the SCS revealed recently that most Classicists are politically left, and a very small minority identify themselves as Republican. But you wouldn’t know it, based on the discourse of the discipline as a whole. Too often, we take our ethnocentrism for granted, sideline these questions, keep on talking about particles and intertextuality, somehow ignoring several elephants in the room (”hey... everyone is really freaking white”) Can we start **really talking** about the fact that we’re an overwhelmingly white discipline, that POC clearly don’t find Classics a congenial atmosphere, despite the.... very-much-not-whiteness of many of the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean? Can we start **really talking** about the interactions of racism and classism, the stench of elitism that hangs over Classics, the exclusionary, gatekeeping tactics that operate in so many ways, some subtle, some overt? Whose is Classics? Are we gonna let it languish and die in the hands of the old elite, as surely it will if it doesn’t start addressing itself to the modern world and at least *attempting* to engage with the rest of the humanities, rather than making a token gesture or two towards “interdisciplinarity” and persisting in doing the same old shit? How do we take it back? How do we make it broader, less exclusionary, more democratic? How do we *reform the whole damn thing from the ground up*? I’m not sure if we can, it would take truly radical moves to even start addressing these questions (from the way languages are taught, on up), but damned if I’m gonna stop talking about it.

guys,

can we have ‘classicists against white supremacy’// ‘classicists against patriarchy’ // ‘classicists against eurocentrism’ // patches

because we’re actually at the ground of what the hate groups and right parties are trying to claim as their own and use as a weapon against others - so it’s time to take back that narrative. 

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

Reading ancient poetry

Girl: the moon is really beautiful tonight

Sappho: you know what else is beautiful?

Girl: *blushes*

Sappho: [...]

Classicists: since we don't have her response, we can say with absolute certainty that it was not gay.

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

After I had explored the whole town with my eyes, I returned to my little room, and, exchanging kisses finally in good faith, I held the boy in the tightest of embraces, and fulfilled my wishes to an enviable degree. But things were not yet entirely finished, when Ascyltos stole up to the doors, and shaking off the bolts with great violence, he found me playing with my brother. He filled the room with laughter and applause. He rolled me out of bed, still covered in my cloak, and he said: “What were you doing, most reverend brother of mine? What's this? Were you making a tent under the covers?” He did not content himself with words alone, but took out a leather strap from his satchel and begun to beat me with no small measure of vigour, adding on arrogant words: “This'll teach you to share with your brother!”

Petronius, Satyrica. A wonderful, bizarre, fragmentary, outrageously queer, uncategorizable text perhaps written under Nero, and immortalized in Fellini Satyricon. At this moment, Ascyltos, the ex-lover frenemy of the narrator Encolpius, bursts in on his foreplay with his 16-year-old boyfriend Giton. Encolpius’ romantic pretensions, cast in the language of aristocratic Roman social obligations, fall flat in a moment of strange and sadistic bathos: Ascyltos wonders why he can’t share his sex little boytoy with his best bro. 

Ascyltos is a cheerful sexual communist. He just wants everyone to share. Brothers share with brothers. A piquant hint of queer kinship, a thread which runs through the entire text, animates this naughty, sexy, unsettling combination of the sublime and the ridiculous, a combination that is thoroughly characteristic of Petronius.

[arbiterofdepravity-blog]

There's three in bed (count 'em): two tops, two bottoms. It might sound like I'm speaking in riddles, but I swear it's the truth: the guy in the middle is servicing two at once, receiving pleasure from behind, dishing it out in front.

Strato of Sardis, a Greek epigrammatist writing under the Roman empire, probably from the time of Hadrian, around 120 CE (Anth. Pal. 12.210). The fun bit about this poem is that, with a flippant epigrammatist’s touch, the poet avows the pleasure of being the penetrated partner in m/m sex, where many ancient sources profess to consider this position abject, disgusting, and unmanly. Strato’s light treatment suggests that being the meat in a manwich was a far more appealing prospect to some ancient Greeks than moralizing sources would suggest.