L'homosexualité dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine (review)

Same-sex love in classical antiquity has of course been the subject of an enormous quantity of scholarship in the last thirty years. When we say "same-sex love in antiquity," however, we generally mean male-male love, as this was a central theme in Greek literature, culture, and art, as well as a significant one in the Roman world. There are few references to female-female love in our ancient sources, and it has consequently suffered from a relative lack of attention even in this period of intense concentration on issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. Boehringer presents the first coherent account of the evidence on this topic, from Sappho to Lucian.

The difficulties that Boehringer faced in writing this book are considerable: there is only a handful of evidence on this topic, and much of it is fragmentary. The Greek sources in particular are each so isolated historically—from the entire classical period, for instance, there are only three references in Plato—that they do not provide enough of a historical context. Boehringer, however, uses the small body of evidence as an opportunity. She gives such a thorough account of each piece's historical and literary context—and of the other erotic discourse from its period, place, and/or genre—that she manages to derive a remarkable amount about each source's attitudes. She even takes the risky step of interpreting the general silence of the different periods of Greek culture on this topic, arguing for instance that our Archaic sources do not regard female-female desire as part of the erotic realm. It is of course easy to dismiss a priori any argumentum ex silentio, but given that there is some slight but definite evidence for female-female erotic relations in the ancient world, Boehringer may be right to see our source's silence as requiring interpretation; in any case, her arguments on this point (as on so many) are solid and intriguing.

If I have a complaint about this book, it is that Boehringer never sums up her conclusions, either at the beginning of the book or the end; instead, at both ends of her book she discusses methodological questions. In the body of her book, Boehringer argues forcefully against many ideas now commonly accepted about female-female love in antiquity. By placing her sources in diachronic order, for instance, she shows that the opprobrium connected with this kind of love in Roman or Imperial authors (in particular Martial, Juvenal, and Lucian) who connect it with gender deviance appears nowhere in our Archaic, Classical, or Hellenistic Greek sources. This (along with many more complicated points) is a striking and valuable contribution to scholarship on this area and should be emphasized clearly.

As a vase scholar, I would also suggest that Boehringer might have included more vase-painting in her volume. She shows an impressive grasp of iconographical interpretation (as she does of myth studies as well), but while I believe she is correct in the interpretations that she presents—both of scenes she views as erotic and of those scenes that she does not—there are a number of other scenes that she might have considered. I see strong parallels to pederastic courtship in NY 06.1021.167, and such vases as Mississippi Univ. 1972.3.72, on which women are portrayed (as, again, pederastic couples sometimes are) with a cloak linking them, are highly suggestive. Both of these vases are illustrated in Nancy Rabinowitz's "Excavating Women's Homoeroticism in Ancient Greece: the Evidence from Attic Vase-Painting"—in N. Rabinowitz and L. Auanger (eds.), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World (Austin 2002)—to which Boehringer refers several times.

These are, however, truly minor quibbles. Boehringer's book is a very important addition to the study of gender and sexuality in antiquity. It is not only the first book-length study of its topic, it also addresses it with...