Homosexuality and ancient history being two of my favourite hobbies, I am delighted to find an excuse to write about them both at once, and I must thank Mr Alexander Psalti for giving me the opportunity. Mr Psalti is the secretary of the Eastern Metropolitan Branch of the Victorian National Party, a position he created for himself when he was expelled from the Liberal Party for being too rightwing. Mr Psalti, a stern opponent of 'permissiveness, promiscuity and immorality', has taken up the cudgels against the Victorian government's proposed homosexual law reform legislation. In a fine, ringing letter of denunciation in the Age (Sept 11) he describes homosexuality as "one of the most indecent, abnormal and abominable human vices" he can think of, and furthermore attributes the fall of the Roman and other decadent empires to their "connivance" at homosexual vice.
Now Mr Psalti and his friends are, I suppose, entitled to froth and gibber about homosexuality if they want to. But I do wish they would treat history a bit more carefully. This bit about the Greeks and the Romans and their dreadful decadence is a very old canard indeed, and several shelvesful of learned works have been devoted to refuting it. But it seems, like all the best myths, to have developed a life of its own, and become an article of faith with the flat-earth Christian Right who are now the most vocal and active opponents of the women's and homosexual movements. And while we in Carlton and Balmain may smile archly over our quiche at the inanities of these fundamentalist know-nothings, they are still a powerful force in places like Queensland and in rural areas generally. It is no accident that the most vigorous anti-homosexual politicking in Victoria at present is coming from Fundamentalist Christians in places like Geelong and Ballarat.
So what is the story on homosexuality and the Roman Empire? I think it's worth knowing, both as a piece of homosexual history and as a weapon to be used against this Decadence stuff when it comes up in antihomosexual propaganda. It also contains useful clues for those interested in the relationship between homosexuality, sexual oppression and patriarchy.
Homosexuality in the Greco-Roman world was almost universally practised and almost universally accepted as a part of everyday life. Yet it did not exist at all in the sense in which we understand it today. Neither in Greece nor in Rome were there groups of people classifying themselves or each other as 'homosexuals' or 'heterosexuals' and regarding each other with disapproval or incomprehension. This bisection of human sexual potential seems to be a modern invention. Both Greek and Roman men and women practised homosexuality and heterosexuality in different social circumstances, at different times in their lives and according to different religious, political and ritual obligations, without drawing any kind of ethical distinction between them.
It is important not to idealise this state of affairs. Both Greek and Roman society were profoundly patriarchal, and in Greece in particular, male homosexuality served as perhaps the most important bonding-mechanism between men. Greek male homosexuality evolved by the Classical period (5th century BC) into a highly ritualised social-political system, with rigidly-defined roles and a powerful educational role. In Sparta and Thebes male homosexual bonding was actually elevated to a form of military organisation
Female homosexuality seems to have been equally widespread and accepted, though subject to the restrictions that the patriarchal order imposed on women's sexuality in general. Unfortunately, our evidence on this is fragmentary, since virtually all our sources are male writers who were generally not interested in what women did, provided they produced legitimate heirs. Furthermore, the most important focus of women' s social life, and hence of female sexuality, were the rituals of the Mystery cults, which men were forbidden to see or know about. The works of only one woman writer, those of Sappho, have survived, and they only in fragments.
There is almost no evidence in any pre-Christian writer of hostility to homosexuality as such. In various sources, individuals are attacked or satirised for promiscuity, prostitution, procurement or youth-fetishism, but nearly always it is the form rather than the object of sexual expression that is disapproved of. All the great heroes of Greek myth and history were credited with homosexual involvements, from Zeus and Ganymede through to Alexander and Hefaistion .
The Romans seem on the whole to have been less high-minded than the Greeks about homosexuality, as they were about sex in general, and the high sense of moral purpose that generally (and probably hypocritically) surrounds Greek writing on the subject is usually missing from Roman accounts. Nevertheless, Roman public men, certainly by Imperial times, seem to have been as cheerfully omnisexual as their Greek counterparts. Julius Caesar does not seem to have minded being described as 'every woman's man and every man's woman' and the Emperor Hadrian set up monuments to his dead lover Antinous all over the Empire. This tradition runs right through to beginning of the Christian era in the fourth century AD.
Which brings me back to Mr Psalti and the mythical decline of the decadent Romans. This peculiar view of history derives, though Mr Psalti may not know it, from Edward Gibbon's 18th century classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first systematic history of the later Empire. Now Gibbon was a superlative writer and, given his limited sources, a brilliant historian, but he had, like many of his contemporaries, a bit of a bee under his bonnet about homosexuality. Also, not being a marxist, nor having much understanding of economic history, he found it difficult to explain why the awesome edifice of the Roman Empire should have crumbled as it did. So he cast about for some superficial explanation that fitted the world-view of his class and his generation, and came up with this line about homosexuality and decadence, which then became a stock line of 19th century moralistic cant.
In fact, of course, the truth of the matter is quite the reverse of Mr Psalti's view, though not nearly so much fun. The Roman Empire fell, as empires do, for straightforward economic reasons; not because of anything to do with sex at all.
By the third century AD the once-vigorous Roman state was ruled by a parasitic horde of soldiers and bureaucrats, who lived off the productive efforts of a dwindling class of farmers and artisans. Most of what would now be wage-labour was performed by slaves. This endless supply of free labour meant that there was no incentive for technical development or economic expansion. The slave system meant that neither a bourgeoisie nor a proletariat in the modern sense could evolve, that there could be no accumulation of capital, and that there was no real economic, social or political development. Only the rich could consume, and they consumed mainly imported luxuries. The wealth of the Empire, built up by conquest not production, thus drained away to the East or was wasted in military expenditure. Once the Empire stopped expanding territorially, it was living off its fat. Its economy first ceased to grow, then stagnated, then began to decline. Put simply, the Roman Empire went broke.
Not having discovered economics, Roman governments had little understanding of what was going on. They tried to cover their deficits by simply increasing taxation, which of course further weakened what remained of the productive economy and eventually destroyed it altogether. When the barbarian challenge came in the fifth century AD, the State could not raise, feed, equip or train the necessary troops to defend its enormous territories, and like the Spanish, British and American Empires after it, it collapsed under the weight of its own economic contradictions.
Finally, I can't resist pointing out one other major change in the later Empire. Late in the fourth century the Emperor Constantine, searching for some political underpinning for his autocratic regime, scrapped the old Greco-Roman state religion with its dozens of quarrelsome gods, and replaced it with a new monotheistic cult from the East, Christianity. The new religion, with its strict hierarchy both celestial and earthly and its admirable stress on social discipline, respect for authority and rendering unto Caesar suited Constantine's purposes nicely. The Christian Church, in return for propping up the regime, obtained vast power over education, morals, the family and social policy generally. One consequence of this was the imposition of the Judaeo-Christian sexual ethic on the Empire in place of the pagan-Hellenic one we have already looked at. This was bad news for homosexuality, and for everything not conforming to the new orthodoxy. By the time the Roman state collapsed in the fifth century the Empire, far from succumbing to homosexuality and decadence as Mr Psalti would have us believe, was already declining into the pious Christian barbarism of the feudal era, whose ideological descendent Mr Psalti is.