Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality, and Authority in Late-Roman Manhood by Mark Masterson (review)

Mark Masterson argues that same-sex desire was a central part of late Roman manhood. Masterson is discussing homosociality; he does not suggest that all men were expected or assumed to engage in homoerotic behavior. He claims, however, that desire haunted Roman (both Greek and Latin) texts, even when it was not explicit. He shows that authors deliberately chose language that evoked earlier writing about same-sex eroticism, particularly Plato. This intertextuality allowed some authors to use this desire as a metaphor; in other cases, it allowed authors to warn against it without ever explicitly mentioning it. Masterson further uses these readings to complicate the now-standard picture of Roman masculinity as the state of being unpenetrated or impenetrable; as he shows, erotic metaphor could put even a masculine individual in the position of the penetrated. He suggests that friendship rather than dominance was the basis for Romans’ thinking about political power.

Masterson’s great contribution to the history of sexuality as written via literature is to take metaphor very seriously without taking it literally. He is thus able to argue that there is a “demonstrable continuity between friendship and same-sex desire” (11) without claiming that all elite Romans were constantly having sex with each other. “Knowledge of the physical realities of male same-sex desire and pleasure” (19) informed and lent authority to writing across a variety of genres, even those prohibiting it. Masterson points out how erotic language is used even between ascetic men, as with Antony of the Desert in Jerome’s Vita Pauli—language that scholars would almost certainly read as erotic if it were used between a man and a woman. Such language could also be used, as by Eunapius, to “depict the admirability of a magnificent man” and “to raise the status of inferiors” (33).

Each of the three main chapters of the book addresses one author and the man or men about whom he writes. The Emperor Julian’s depiction of Marcus Aurelius in his Caesares uses Plato’s Symposium and “infuses [it] with a narration of same-sex desire” (43) and with glamour, but the words (kallos amechanon) used to evoke that desire cast the emperor as the beloved rather than the lover and thus are “transgressive of the norms … of activity and passivity” (46). Platonic pederasty is evoked in relations between adult men (Marcus Aurelius and the audience for the biography), but Marcus is honorable even though he is the object of the desire: “Evocation of the forbidden could consolidate rather than dissipate masculine auctoritas” (85).

Athanasius’s life of Antony, Masterson suggests in the second chapter, shows significant continuity with discourses of late antique manhood while at the same time rejecting same-sex desire. Athanasius occludes rather than explicitly forbids that desire. Nevertheless, Masterson argues, the expected audience would have read the desire between the lines and understood Athanasius’s attack on it. This argument perhaps pushes intertextuality farther than it will comfortably go. Athanasius cites Romans 1:26–27 in other works that perhaps not all readers of the Vita Antonii will have read. Certainly Paul may have been front and center in Athanasius’s mind, but that does not mean that “a reader of the vita will be thinking long and hard about the same-sex desire seemingly missing from Athanasius’ Antony, same-sex desire that is then added because of things known about the dynamics of homosocial spaces” (93). Masterson suggests that readers experienced in a homosocial world would find the very absence of homoerotic language in accounts of the desert communities surprising and would therefore have read them more closely (111). But from where, if not from these or similar texts, does our knowledge of a late Roman audience come such that we can say that they will be thinking of same-sex desire when a text evokes it...