Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome (review)

Caroline Vout uses four case studies of Roman emperors and their lovers to explore how these imperial beloveds might have served as ideological intermediaries between ordinary Romans and their rulers. By looking at an image of Antinous or reading a poem about Earinus, Romans might imagine themselves both as imperial lover and viewer and as the imperial beloved and object. These extramarital relationships thus lent a human dimension to the figure of the omnipotent Emperor while simultaneously calling into question his masculinity and dominance.

The first chapter, "The Erotics of Imperium," is an elongated introduction to Vout's general themes. It justifies the legitimacy of her topic and defends sexual gossip as a meaningful source of discourse about emperors. It begins by comparing two similar anecdotes about Augustus' and Caligula's habits of sexual predation on Roman elite women, although it does not really address the relation of these anecdotes within the larger tradition of Roman invective. This is particularly true for the Augustus example, which originates in Antony and Octavian's war of sexualized insults. Vout stresses her focus on the implications of the discourse rather than on the discourse itself (11). However, since she goes into exhaustive detail about the historical context of her later examples, it is odd to find it minimized here at the beginning.

Vout also uses the first chapter to establish her major themes, although she never clearly delineates which theme is actually dominant. She addresses the religious iconography associated with these Imperial lovers, but this seems primarily relevant in the case of Antinous. She also focuses on the idea of "Greekness" versus "Romanness" in all her examples; this dichotomy would be even more intriguing if she contrasted her examples with a Roman imperial beloved or, alternatively, an influential Greek advisor who was not romantically involved with the Emperor. As it is, it is unclear how representative her examples are. The first three case studies focus on male-male desire, and indeed this seems to be the major driving theme of the book until we reach the last chapter, which concerns a male-female relationship and treats the more conventional genre of elegy.

In general, perhaps the weakest part of this book is the lack of a clear overarching thesis to bind together these four fascinating, individual chapters. Vout herself emphasizes that the chapters are designed to be accessible separately so that readers interested only in Antinous or Martial can restrict themselves to a small section of her book (16). The necessary result of this approach, unfortunately, is a series of loosely connected articles that do not build to a definite resolution.

The second half of the first chapter offers a number of different theoretical models that Vout uses in the subsequent case studies. These include Foucauldian phallocratic theory, which emphasizes the power of the penetrator, and Mulveian gaze theory, which focuses on the power of the viewer. Both offer tempting and complex ways of conceptualizing the emperor-beloved relationship; Vout lays out both paradigms and her own elaborations of them very precisely.

Chapter 2, nearly twice as long as any of the other chapters, focuses on the story of Hadrian and Antinous and most particularly on the visual representations of Antinous. Vout begins by offering full versions of all the surviving literary evidence and her own excellent if cautious translations of the relevant passages. Even if she is focusing on the implications of the discourse, her placement of passages by Pausanias, Cassius Dio, Aurelius Victor, and the Historia Augusta next to each other without more than a brief comment about their different eras is startling and a bit dismaying. I doubt, for instance, that the Historia Augusta can have been written in the third century, a possibility offered by Vout, and in any case, it is by far the latest and most dubious text (54). If the intended audience of this book is a "we" of ancient historians, as Vout suggests (63), then a cultural history of...