This volume is a welcome addition to our appreciation of how recent theoretical developments can further elucidate the materiality of the cinaedus and socio-sexual discourses around this complex figure. Since the 1990s a good deal of classical scholarship has studied the cinaedus (κίναιδος), primarily through Roman literary sources, which are nearly all hostile in nature. Influenced by the Foucauldian paradigm of ancient sexuality, this scholarship has viewed the cinaedus as a historically contingent social identity characterised by a range of non-normative sexual behaviours and/or gender expressions: a passive sexually penetrated male, someone who exhibits gender fluidity or ‘incorrect’ gender performance, sexually excessive and aggressively sexual effeminate, and a literary construct that both subverted and reinforced the Roman hypermasculine discourse.
The volume brings together ten essays demonstrating that the concept of cinaedus was contextual and more nuanced than its previously presumed gender and sexual implications. The book primarily focuses on the Roman period. However, three essays extend the discussion to other historical situations: G. Sissa examines the classical Greek conceptualisation of κίναιδος, T. Sapsford considers its Hellenistic context, and M. Masterson explores its late Roman and Byzantine afterlife. These contributions provide a diachronic view of the changing social meaning of the term cinaedus/κίναιδος. The introductory chapter also touches upon the role of ancient cinaedi in the formation of modern homosexual identities, thereby suggesting possible avenues for future research in classical reception. As with most edited volumes, the quality of the contributions varies. Some essays are more compelling and useful than others, but the whole collection is certainly worth reading.
The introductory essay by Gazzari and Weiner is particularly strong. It offers a solid discussion of the ambivalent meaning of cinaedus in Roman culture and nicely synthesises debates of earlier foundational scholarship on the subject (D. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love [1990]; A. Richlin, Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 [1993]; C.A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality [20102]; J.J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece [1990]). Thus, the introductory essay theoretically and historically situates the papers that follow and clearly sets the volume's objectives: ‘to probe both virtues and limits of Foucault's interpretational frames, and most importantly concerning the figures of the ancient [Greek] kinaidos and the Roman cinaedus, ventures what remains the fundamental question: who were they?’ (p. 10).
The contributors use (to a different degree) a range of theoretical approaches and methods, including intersectionality, queer theory, materiality and sensorial studies, and literary analysis, to revisit and recontextualise the concept of cinaedus. In doing so, the volume not only delivers fresh perspectives on cinaedi and gender diversity in Roman society, but also contributes to the growing scholarship that problematises the penetration model of Roman sexuality and challenges the binary approaches to ancient gender, sex and sexuality (D. Kamen and S. Levin-Richardson, ‘Revisiting Roman Sexuality: Agency and the Conceptualization of Penetrated Males’, in: M. Masterson, N. Rabinowitz and J. Robson [edd], Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World [2015], pp. 449–60; T. Sapsford, Performing the Kinaidos: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures [2022]; A. Surtees and J. Dyer [edd], Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World [2020]).
Sissa's opening chapter, ‘Κιναίδων βίος: Ethics, Lifestyle, and Sensuality in Greek Erotic Culture’, offers a theoretical enquiry into the Greek conceptualisation of κίναιδος through the analysis of works by Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes and Aeschines. Sissa contends that the term κίναιδος was viewed as a personal trait linked to ideas of softness and uncontainable desire for sexual pleasure. She challenges the proposition that the active sexual role securely safeguarded one's honour and argues that even a penetrator (erastes) could be associated with κίναιδος if he lacked self-control. In this regard Sissa's essay brings to light the limitation of the active/passive penetration model for our understanding of the ancient Greek homoerotic experience.
The model of symmetrical active/passive binarism is also challenged by J.P. Hallett and D. Lateiner in ‘Connotation and ‘Com-motion’: Putting the Kinesis into the Roman Cinaedus’. Hallett and Lateiner's essay complicates the perception of cinaedus’ passivity by bringing to the fore the figure's sexual agency expressed through kinetic performances. Through their literary analysis of cinaedi in Petronius and Catullus, the authors argue that the exaggerated movements of the buttocks and lips of cinaedi may be linked to their deliberate pursuits of oral and anal penetration. Contrary to scholars such as A. Richlin, the authors argue that the term cinaedus functioned primarily as a slur used to attack men in power rather than as a self-ascribed identity or taxonomic category. The authors, however, do not negate the presence of cinaedi on the Roman sexual scene, but rather propose that the term was ‘something someone calls someone else, not something someone calls himself’ (p. 156).
Sapsford's and Gazzarri's essays are among the strongest contributions to the volume. In ‘Cleomachus: A Study in “Cinaedic” Associations’ Sapsford examines Strabo's and Tertullian's accounts of Cleomachus’ transformation from a boxer into a poet and effeminate person through his encounter with a cinaedus. Sapsford makes excellent use of intersectionality and queer theory to collapse the paid-dancer/pervert binary and to reveal the cultural production of cinaedus across multiple and overlapping axes of difference, mainly sexuality, gender performance and appearance, poetic production and authenticity. Sapsford's analysis is theoretically sophisticated and will, along with his other work on the subject, remain important to the future scholarship on cinaedi.
Gazzarri's paper, ‘Cinaedus Galbinatus: Cultural Perception of the Color “Green” and Its Gender Association with Pathici in Rome’, turns attention to galbinus (Gr. chlōros) – a yellowish green colour – and its association with gender and morality in Roman society. The essay traces the history of galbinus in the works of Juvenal, Martial and Petronius and across the ancient and early modern medical discourses to establish that the colour signified feminine aesthetics and sensitivity and was also associated with the female body (pathology). The ancient literary association of cinaedi with galbinus-coloured garments leads Gazzarri to propose that cinaedi were not only defined through their sexuality, but were also morally marginalised for materially expressing gender nonconformity. This deliberate choice in publicly displaying galbinus-coloured garments may be viewed as an expression of a self-defined gender difference. Gazzarri's argument sets cinaedi apart from pathici. It aligns with Hallett and Lateiner's case for a socially and culturally meaningful distinction between the Latin terms cinaedus and pathicus.
J.R. Clarke's ‘Representing the Cinaedus in Roman Visual Culture: Seeing, Speaking, Touching’ revisits Roman visual representations of the cinaedus in public and private art and approaches them from the point of the viewer's sensorium and material agency. Some elite objects portraying sex between two adult men, such as the Leiden gemstone and the Warren Cup, allowed for intimate contemplation of homoerotic love. At the same time images of the cinaedus in the Pompeian tavern and suburban baths incited laughter and offered apotropaic protection. Clarke's proposition that the wine drinkers in the frescoes from the Caupona of Salvius in Pompeii may be humorous depictions of cinaedi is a plausible reading.
Clarke's discussion of images in which a man engages in sex with both men and women suggests that any man who is sexually penetrated could be understood as a cinaedus. By contrast, K. Ormand, in ‘Did (Imaginary) Cinaedi Have Sex with Women?’, argues that, as represented in Roman literary sources, cinaedi were defined by their lack of desire to have sex with women. Ormand also disputes the notion of the ‘womanising cinaedus’, viewing it as a misunderstanding of certain forms of ancient literary insults and invective by modern scholarship. Instead, he maintains that the cinaedus is ‘a form of “gender-deviance,” marked by a general effeminacy of which a desire to be penetrated constituted an important, but not decisive part’ (p. 252).
B.E. Stevens, in ‘The “Chorus Cinaedorum” in Apuleius’ Golden Ass’, examines Apuleius’ portrayal of a group of priests of the Dea Syria recognised for their bodily difference, sexual perversity and interest in superstition. For Stevens the priests of Atargatis may represent a real historical subculture with their physical differences and actions paralleling Lucius’ metamorphosis. Building on E. Adkins's recent work on identity, power, speech and discourse, Stevens approaches Lucius’ metamorphosis as a prospective glimpse into the ways in which transwomen and other assigned-male-at-birth individuals were socially excluded from Roman dominant culture.
B.K. Gold, in ‘Can a Woman Be a Cinaedus? Interrogating Catullus 10 and Roman Social Norms’, argues that Catullus’ uses of the adjective cinaedior when describing a woman designates her a social rather than a sexual deviant. Gold proposes that the poem reveals social hierarchies that operated intersectionally across gender, class and ethnicity, thereby echoing earlier feminist interpretations of the poem. Meanwhile, Weiner's ‘The Kinaidos Comes to Rome: Plautus’ Cinaedi’ traces Plautus’ humorous and insulting portrayal of cinaedi (all of whom are dancers). She suggests that the meanings of cinaedi and the comical effect of stories about them relied on the process of social ‘othering’ at the intersection of class, sexuality and gender expression.
The concluding essay by Masterson, ‘Kinaidos: The Afterlife of a Term in the Byzantine Empire’, surveys the later Roman and Byzantine understanding and meaning of κίναιδος. Masterson observes that in the works of Pseudo-Gregory of Akragas (fifth century ce) a κίναιδος is viewed exclusively in sexual terms, whereas in the writings of Michael Psellos (eleventh century ce) the term encompasses both sexual behaviour and gender performance. Masterson concludes that, while Christian writers generally condemn male–male intercourse, the Byzantines, unlike the ancient Romans, typically tend to decouple same-sex relations from socially non-conforming gender performances.
The book is well-edited, the translations are done well, and the bibliography is generous. The footnotes are comprehensive, albeit rather lengthy in some instances. The volume makes an important contribution to the current research concerning Roman society as well as the history of sexuality and gender scholarship. It will be of value to both students and scholars of sexuality and gender in the classical world.
