How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  As you sputter through Boswell’s attempts to demonstrate that frater was essentially interchangeable with amator for the early Christian clerics who first concocted the same-sex unions, you can’t help thinking that, even if he’s right about all the frater stuff, it’s still a pretty oblique line of argument. The oldest manuscripts in which the adelphopoiêsis is transmitted were written in Greek by Greek speakers; the later Latin and Old Church Slavonic versions are merely translations. (Boswell is right to omit them from his appendices here.) I suppose that Boswell’s inclusion of the frater stuff is meant to establish a context of pervasive brother/lover confusion throughout the ancient Mediterranean, but what he really needs is incontrovertible evidence for extensive and commonplace use of the Greek word adelphos to mean “lover”—and in everyday, rather than highly specialized, contexts. Come to think of it, even that may not be enough. The assumption that allows Boswell’s conclusion to be properly drawn is that the word adelphos would have superseded any other word for “lover” in the minds of the Greek speakers who first wrote down the adelphopoiêsis ceremony. But Boswell can’t, in fact, reliably demonstrate this, and so all of the carefully rigged dissertations about the erotic, figurative potential of frater and soror turn out to be window dressing.

  Here again, it’s worth noting that Boswell suppresses a pesky bit of information by sticking it in a thicket of thorny notes. There, he observes that postclassical Greek adelphos lacked a clearly erotic sense, which in fact had to be supplied by the transliterated Latin frater (in a special poetic sense, as his example from the Greek Anthology indicates). If it is “inescapably” clear that adelphos would have been widely understood as meaning “lover” to those who invented and later transcribed the adelphopoiêsis ceremony (as Boswell goes on to claim), then why the need to borrow from Latin?

  This contortion of the Greek and Latin tongues turns out to be only the first storey, as it were, of a wobbly argumentative structure. Here is its blueprint:

  The ceremony discussed [i.e., adelphopoiêsis] is titled and uses phrases that could be translated “become brothers,” or “make brotherhood”…and one approach would be to render them this way, “literally.” But if, as seems inescapably clear…the meanings of the nouns to contemporaries were “lover,” and “form an erotic union,” respectively, then “brother” and “make brothers” are seriously misleading and inaccurate translations for English readers.

  Note again the slippery rhetorical slope: the denigration of any nonerotic sense of adelphos to a “literalness” that the author has taken considerable pains to show is insufficient; the tendentious aside about the “inescapable” truth of what are, in fact, merely his own premises; the logically flawed progress by which a potential connotation becomes, finally, always and absolutely denotative.

  Boswell’s discussion of the language and diction of “same-sex” eros is meant to be grounded in a far-reaching demonstration that the social context for the equation Brother=Lover was a venerated tradition of institutionalized homosexual unions in Greek and Roman culture. It is from this cultural source, he argues, that adelphopoiêsis flowed—the liturgical celebration of a reciprocal, mutual affect between loving male couples that was first publicly celebrated in pagan antiquity.

  In the case of Greece, this argument must necessarily take the form of debunking what has become the prevailing view that male homosexual relationships in Greece were structured according to a clear-cut hierarchical distinction between the attitude of the lover, or erastês, and that of his younger beloved, the erômenos or, more colloquially, paidika. Now it is surely true, as Boswell and others (such as John Winkler and Kenneth De Vries) have argued, that the strict hierarchization of Eros in classical culture, like other Greek social institutions such as the seclusion of women, was likely to have been more “rhetorical” than both ancient accounts and modern interpretations of them often give credit for. But Boswell’s own discussion of relevant texts hardly justifies his impatient dismissal of what he calls the “arch, stylized, and misleading view of Greek homosexuality” advanced by many contemporary scholars, as a “shallow misreading of ‘popular’ literature.” Hence, for example, the fact that even the ancients were unsure as to whether Achilles or Patroclus was the erastês in that particular relationship does not necessarily support the author’s claim that “it is probably wrong to imagine that ‘lover’ and ‘beloved’ were clearly defined positions or roles.” You could just as well argue that the fact that ancient writers were willing to devote time and energy to pondering this question suggests that such roles were in fact institutionalized—to the extent that who was on top was something worth knowing in the first place.

  Boswell tends to support his assertions about Greek cultural institutions with references to important (if often unrepresentative) texts that are, as often as not, given without their proper context. Hence, for example, his liberal and rather sentimental use of the Symposium, which according to him provides a clear demonstration that Greek same-sex love was as completely reciprocal as the (alleged) medieval same-sex unions that were (he alleges) its cultural descendants. The proof, he argues, is in the fact that in this work, both eros and philia, “desire” (erotic) and “friendship” (unerotic), could be used to describe a single relationship:

  In describing one of the most famous same-sex couples of the ancient world—Harmodius and Aristogeiton, whose enduring and exclusive love was thought to have brought about the institution of Attic democracy—he [Plato] uses both [erôs] and [philia] (182C).

  He then goes on to translate a line of the Symposium that refers to Aristogeiton’s eros and Harmodius’s philia; and elsewhere reiterates the fact that Plato used within a single sentence both eros and philia for the same relationship as proof that the two words were synonymous. But his subsequent acknowledgment (relegated to a footnote) that “the phrasing could be taken to suggest that the two men had quite different sorts of feelings for each other”—i.e., Aristogeiton felt eros, erotic desire, whereas Harmodius felt philia, nonerotic affection—gives little indication of the extent to which the passage he cites here could, in fact, be construed as ideal support for the “arch, stylized, and misleading” view of Greek homosexuality that he elsewhere denigrates. The Athenian tradition was that Aristogeiton was the erastês of Harmodius: so Thucydides, in his account of the tyrannicides’ plot (6.54). Aristogeiton’s eros is thus hardly interchangeable with Harmodius’s philia in an affective dynamic characterized by a perfect reciprocity of loving friendship, as Boswell would have it. If anything, each of the emotions described in this passage conforms with great precision to the Greek schematization of homosexual affect described by Dover in his edition of the Symposium: “The more mature male, motivated by eros, pursues, and the younger, if he yields, is motivated by affection, gratitude and admiration” (Dover).

  I should add that throughout his discussion of the Symposium and other texts, Boswell neglects to consider any potential interpretive ramifications of speaker and context—for example, that there might be a grain of self-interest in the opinions expressed by the erastês Pausanias, or by the comic poet Aristophanes, in Symposium. Here as elsewhere, he merely cites a given passage as an example of “what Plato thinks,” regardless of speaker or of dramatic, philosophical, or ideological context. Given that Plato’s discourse about love retains considerable cultural authority not merely in the West in general but, perhaps more important for many readers of Same-Sex Unions, in gay culture particularly, this is careless.

  But the selective and ultimately self-interested nature of Boswell’s use of classical sources is most apparent in his discussion of what he asserts was a tradition of “formal [homosexual] unions” in ancient Rome. These, he declares, were “publicly recognized relationships entailing some change in status for one or both parties, comparable in this sense to heterosexual marriage”; he goes on to make the claim that such relationships occasionally used “the customs and forms of heterosexual marriage.”

  Incre
dibly, the sole piece of evidence adduced in favor of this outrageous claim consists of a satiric epigram of the first-century A.D. satirist Martial, in which the writer describes a male-male “wedding” (12.42). “Such unions,” the author of Same-Sex Unions asserts, “were not always private.” That “always” is a good demonstration of a typically Boswellian one-two argumentative punch: the slippery slope followed by begging the question. For “always” slyly alchemizes a single (alleged) instance into a widespread social practice; and in making this highly tendentious insinuation (that private wedding ceremonies between men in fact regularly took place) the premise for an even broader conclusion (i.e., that such unions were in fact often public), Boswell is, in effect, assuming what he needs to prove.

  This questionable reasoning is buttressed by some rather casual methodology. Boswell’s discussion of what he insists were formal public marriages between men in ancient Rome treats Martial’s verses (and, later, Juvenal’s) as if they were straight reportage rather than acidic satire; once again, he rips literary evidence out of its proper generic and historical context in order to score his same-sex points. You’d never guess that Martial ran with, and wrote for, a café society crowd with whom John Q. Roman is unlikely to have hobnobbed. Not for the first time, Boswell here makes a methodological error that J. P. Sullivan, in an article that Boswell himself, oddly enough, cites, succinctly characterized: “We cannot easily distinguish,” Sullivan wrote, “in Martial or his audience, between what is reality, i.e., common sexual facts or practices, and what is desired or feared, sometimes even repressed….” In order to realize one particular fantasy of happily-ever-after, boy-boy weddings in ancient Rome, Boswell keeps adducing supporting material that is highly unrepresentative.

  Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the historical evidence used to demonstrate that gay marriage ceremonies weren’t “always” private: an account of a feast at which Nero married a freedman eunuch called, delightfully, Pythagoras. Here as always, the author provides an impressive-looking footnote: Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and especially Tacitus are all cited (“generally a very reliable source,” Boswell approvingly notes of the last). But you can’t help wondering why, if Tacitus is so reliable, Boswell doesn’t quote the historian’s introduction to this narrative—the bit where Tacitus disapprovingly recalls Nero’s feast as a prime example of the excess and depravity (luxus, prodigentia) of the decadent imperial court. Using Nero’s sozzled antics as evidence for the assertion that marriage ceremonies between gay Roman men were regularly and publicly held is intellectually dishonest and philologically irresponsible. It’s like relying on Town and Country’s coverage of Truman Capote’s 1966 Black and White Ball as the basis for generalizations about the lives of gay white men before Stonewall. This stuff wouldn’t pass in an undergraduate paper, and it shouldn’t have passed here.

  Such are the bases for Boswell’s claims about the classical background for adelphopoiêsis. It is unfortunate that this inadequate discussion of classical material turns out to be a rich preparation for what follows; for in treating the ceremonies themselves in their medieval context, the author of Same-Sex Unions merely reiterates the skewed linguistic and cultural analyses that are by now all too familiar. In his discussion of premodern Christian Europe, the author again insists on a pervasive failure to distinguish between the literal and the figurative—in this case, between “the chaste, charitable sense in which all Christians addressed each other as siblings, and the erotic, marital sense” (134). But his evidence for the claim that “the conjugal implications of the words in question, frater and soror, ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ were not absent” from liturgical contexts turns out to be little more than idiosyncratic readings that once again beg rather than answer the important questions.

  To support his point about sibling vocabulary, for example, the author cites Justinian’s Novel 133.3, a rule prohibiting women from entering male religious space “even if he should call himself her brother, or she his sister” (nec si quis forte frater esse dicatur, aut soror) (135). For Boswell this rule demonstrates that “even in this ecclesiastical context, the phrase [sic] ‘sister’…suggested distinct disapproval” (135)—disapproval, presumably, because of what Boswell alleges are the word’s inevitably conjugal and erotic implications. Yet the phrasing of the rule surely derives its force from an assumption of a wholly nonerotic sense of frater and soror (whether literal or, as is here more likely, in the figurative sense applied to the inhabitants of monastic communities): the sense seems clearly to be that the woman is to be prevented from entering “even if she claims to be merely a sister, or he claims to be merely a brother”: for the author of this rule, the sibling terms were unequivocally innocent words that might successfully provide a cover for not-so-innocent goings on. Only a fairly deaf interpretive ear could take evidence such as this to support the extraordinary claim that “the countererotic”—which is of course to say literal—“sense of ‘brother’ was largely unknown in the premodern Christian world, because all relationships were expected to be chaste in the sense of subordinating desire to responsibility” (24). This is a bit like saying that the literal sense of the word “brother” is unknown in urban African-American communities today, because young black men often refer to one another as “brother.” Context is everything.

  Boswell then proceeds to an oddly insubstantial treatment of the late antique and early medieval sociosexual context for his adelphopoiêsis ceremonies. This discussion is as wobbly as his discussion of homoerotic relationships in the classical period. When he provides a detailed description of early Christian ambivalence about sexuality in marriage, it is only to promote a portrait of marriage in the Middle Ages as being largely unconcerned with procreation—an arch, stylized, and misleading model if ever there was one. And all this serves to justify yet another careless tumble down the logical slope: he argues that because celibacy was endorsed by the Church in a way that was unthinkable in classical times (and his evidence for classical attitudes about celibacy is a note remarking that the number of vestal virgins was low), then it stands to reason that nonprocreative—and hence eventually same-sex—unions would have been endorsed with equal vigor:

  Given what has already been adduced about the veneration of same-sex pairs (especially military saints) in the early church, and a corresponding ambivalence about heterosexual matrimony, it is hardly surprising that there should have been a Christian ceremony solemnizing same-sex unions.

  What, you may ask, has already been adduced about the veneration of same-sex pairs? Little more than Boswell’s own hints that the early Christian martyrs Saints Serge and Bacchus were…comme ça. And how do we know? Well, they call each other “brother,” and by now we all know what that means. (The circularity of Boswell’s argumentation here leaves you a bit dizzy.) Then there’s the fact that the parading of the pair through the streets “recalls,” as Boswell puts it, one of the penalties for homosexual acts—although one that even Boswell admits postdated the historical date of the saints’ martyrdom (and which, moreover, was not unique to those being punished for sodomy). Finally, the Greek word used in the account of their martyrdom to describe their affection for each other, syndesmos or “bond,” is also used in the New Testament in the phrase syndesmos adikias, “bond of iniquity” (i.e., sodomy). Boswell exclaims over what he sees as the “fascinating association” between these two instances of syndesmos, but for his readers it’s merely another example of the author’s penchant for free association—a demonstration of the “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” variety. Such is the evidence that Boswell keeps “adducing”; but more often than not, it’s induction rather than adduction.

  The author’s refusal to acknowledge the validity of any interpretive or sociological contexts other than homoerotic ones results in the addition of a third argumentative fallacy to his repertoire: the straw-man. Ignoring the ritualized-friendship tradition, he addresses himself to demolishing what he calls the “least controversial” interpreta
tion of the ceremony, i.e., that it was an ecclesiastical formalization of some kind of “spiritual fraternity.” But of course the “least controversial” interpretation is the one scholars have advanced for over a century: that the adelphopoiêsis was created to solemnify alliances between heads of households or to formalize reconciliations between mutually distrustful members of opposing clans. (As the historian Brent Shaw pointed out in his negative New Republic review of Boswell’s book, the ceremony’s emphasis on the right to asylum and safe conduct surely supports such an interpretation.) Here as so often, Boswell ignores the evidence that doesn’t suit him. Instead, he brandishes his famous erudition and plunges it deep into the heart of…a straw man.

  The straw man isn’t the only fantastical creature you’re liable to run across as you travel down the twisty argumentative road leading to Boswell’s conclusion that the adelphopoiêsis was a medieval gay wedding service. It’s a journey filled with scary-looking beasts: philological lions and methodological tigers and plain old logical bears. And at the end of the road is the wizard himself. But even as his smoke-wreathed illusions of church-sanctioned gay marriages materialize before his awestruck readers’ eyes, you realize that he’s working the controls furiously, way down there in the footnotes where no one can see him. He’s the man behind the curtain. Unfortunately, given the explosive political potential of this particular scholarly conjuring act, the author’s introductory admonition to ignore the methods by which he achieves his impressive-looking results is deeply troubling, to say the least. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” he may cry; but if you look closely enough, you realize you’re being conned.