In the Beginning

This episode covers the creation of humankind. After Prometheus created men and women, Dionysus showed up to make sure humans could never be a simple heteronormative binary. We dissect the resulting creation of Tribadas and molles mares, the archetypal LGBT+ people!

Transcript

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the fourth episode of Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity Podcast, your home for all things LGBT in the ancient world. I'm your host, Dominica Raven, episode 4, In the Beginning. Aesop, the famous fable writer, was once asked, Why are gays and lesbians? Unsurprisingly, he replied with a moralizing fable. Prometheus, the god of forethought, once created human beings by the will of Zeus. He molded our bodies with earthen clay and salty tears, creating the most excellent form of life, humanity. Once he had the general body structure, resembling something like a bunch of genderless, smooth dolls, he started to add genitals. While Prometheus was working on his task, along came Bacchus with a little trick to prevent the creation of an absolute gender and sexual binary. Bacchus invited Prometheus to dinner, and the two got blind, slobbering winefaced. So Prometheus stoopered home late and drowsy, and rather than going to bed, he completed his work, attaching genitals to the clay dolls. But because of the intervention of Bacchus, Prometheus started attaching female parts to male bodies and put male members on some female bodies, and that is where gays and lesbians come from. Many modern people think that sexuality was a thing added to the innate way human beings were meant to be. Humans were created in an absolute heteronormative binary, but those evil sodomites rebelled against the natural, divine law and created unnatural and unholy homosexuality. Or humans were judged by the laws of natural selection, which requires a heteronormative binary to ensure genetics are passed appropriately. Either way, many people would argue that heteronormativity is the universal default, and everybody else is just doing something queer. But that is not what's going on when the Greek gods produced humanity. Human sexuality could not have been something simple. From the very beginning, humans could never have been one man and one woman in a heteronormative monogamistic model. Now, the fact that all types of people have a proper origin story does not necessarily show social acceptance for such people. So the question is, what exactly did Dionysus and Prometheus create in the dawn of time? Let's start with the terms used in the story itself. The fable uses the words trebada, literally rubbing women, or women who rub, and moles mares, literally soft men. Trabadas is derived from tribe, which means rubbing. The word is used for literal rubbing, but also for wearing away or wear and tear. Additionally, it can be used metaphorically as one who is rubbed by anxiety or rubbed by love. For this reason, the phrase sometimes is used to mean abandoned wretch. But I think it's pretty clear none of these definitions are what this story intends. The phrase women who rub is particularly tricky because it can imply homoeroticism when women are rubbing together, but it can also imply masturbation, which may or may not be homoerotic at all. As for the word moles, well that means yielding or pliable, but more neutrally soft, gentle, or even just pleasant. In general, it's acceptable as an adjective for Roman women or for eunuchs, but not generally acceptable for masculine Roman men. The word is sometimes used in conjunction with another Latin phrase called pathicus, which means submitting to lust when used for either men or for women. As for the word mares, well that's an inflected form of the word man, which denotes human male or masculinity, and is not generally used as an umbrella term for something like mankind. So from the words themselves we gain an image of gender nonconformity. Women lewdly pursuing desires and men submitting to others' desires. But from the context of the story, it's also clear that gender nonconformity is critical. So, how do we interpret the type of homoeroticism indicated by this narrative? Like so many terms from antiquity, these words appear to reflect a pattern of behavior, a collection of character traits, or from the perspective of heteronormative society, character flaws, only some of which are actually directed to sexuality. Much like Quinaidos from the other week, a soft man might be one who enjoys just a soft lifestyle without much physical exertion or active work. This is someone who prefers the creature comforts of palatial or urban life, and perhaps indulges in exotic goods like silken robes or gemstone rings. In this light, a soft man is a metrosexual. But the phrase also refers to people who would prefer male companionship. Meanwhile, the word rubbing women can be used to describe homoeroticism, but is also used in some contexts to describe a vagrant or beggar woman. Adding to the difficulty, this story, written in Latin in the first century, is one of the very first documented usages of the term triba, so it's really difficult to interpret which definition is intended. Despite the potential pitfalls of the language itself, I think it's pretty clear that this story intends to explain human sexuality. The last line makes this obvious. After Prometheus had finished adding the mismatched genitals, the narrative voice says, Thus modern desires delight in such, not straight, joys, implying both that this desire was prevalent and that these people who engaged in it were viewed somewhat differently than the standard heterosexual encounters. Additionally, sexuality and gendered expressions are directly related to one another from the very beginning. This passage describes the creation of gender nonconformity while simultaneously creating and conflating it with homosexuality. This is something we'll have to keep returning to across different types of sources. Ancient authors generally frame homosexual interactions within the context of gender nonconformity precisely because their sexual interests do not conform to expectations. Many lesbians, even Sappho herself, were called mannish, while even Roman emperors who favored male companionship were called effeminate. Many ancient commenters strongly associate gender nonconformity as an outward manifestation of the social deviance of internal desires. So the language and the context of the story clearly indicates homoeroticism, but we haven't actually answered the question yet. What did Dionysus and Prometheus create? There are two ways of thinking on this matter, drawn from scholarly interpretations of the text's ambiguities. This is particularly tricky because the narrative itself does not explicitly state which key terms are correlated with which bodily anatomy. The first way of thinking is that there's a sexual metaphor at work in the language. Some scholars read the story's mismatched parts as a reference to forms of penetration. Essentially, there are men who enjoyed being penetrated, and these men have metaphorical vaginas, so they can yield to others' desires. Meanwhile, a woman who is, quote, endowed with a monstrous clitoris has been masculinized. So these women have metaphorical penises. So, this first way to think about the fable is that the rubbing women are describing gay men, and soft men are actually describing gay women. Scholars who adopt this way of thinking associate the physical bodily manifestations of homoeroticism as the source of their sexual deviance. This is not an invalid way to think about the story, but it suffers from a conflation of homoeroticism with disorders of sexual differentiation. For my part, I believe it's a little too convenient that many scholars believe there are discrete bodily traits which define a male or female homosexual body. Outsiders today have completely arbitrary yet visibly obvious criterion to describe what they perceive as a gay or lesbian body, regardless of what they would describe themselves as. So the fact that an ancient observer might also have this arbitrary set of criteria, even though it's a little different, is no surprise. The second way that scholars assemble these elements is in terms of the sexual roles played by either individual. A man who plays dominant sexual roles is obviously the proper male, and the female who plays the proper submissive roles is the normal female. But men who played submissive roles were soft men, and women who played dominant roles were the rubbers. So Prometheus actually changed the sex of the individuals in the story, and the result is that people have different desires based on their internal gender. These people's queer desires come from the disconnect between their inner male libido with their outward female-looking bodies, or the other way around. These people were queer because their bodies failed to live up to gendered expectations in the ancient world. So, this way to think about the story is that the rubbing women are gay women and soft men are the gay men. For my part, I find this more convincing. I think that the order of the word implies the order we should interpret it. The story asks why did Prometheus create trebada and moles mares in that order? Later, the narrative voice describes putting female parts on male bodies and male members on female bodies in that order. Overall, the word order does tend to matter in this type of story, where lists show the directionality, and we should be considering them as the intended meaning of the text itself. If we read the story with the first interpretation, the order gets reversed halfway through, whereas the second interpretation maintains the word order throughout. Beyond word order, this interpretation seems to fit better with the ancient construction of homosexuality. The homoerotic is necessarily a function of the heteronormative. The abstract concept that two men might come together and what they do does not mirror the heterosexual world was a wholly foreign concept for many in the ancient world. And what luck! The idea of two men coming together and not mirroring heteronormative expectations is still a foreign concept for many living today. As such, an overgeneralization based around ancient and modern discussions gets projected onto relationships. Just for the record, I don't like this oversimplification, especially when the ancient sources we're using are clearly condemnatry. When we see poets or authors actually engaging in homosexuality themselves, they generally describe deep, meaningful connections with their partners and never really a set of penetrable body parts they're entitled to. Even if people did describe their desires this way, the model where two men or two women come together could have included all manner of activities beyond simple heteronormative analogies. Despite ancient authors making speculative comments and occasionally even raising criminal trials related to gay men who play the wrong roles in bed, how on earth could they have even policed that? It makes more sense to me that homoerotic relationships in the ancient world, as in the modern world, took on a myriad of shapes and forms. A singular heteronormative analogy is generally inadequate, as the same individual might well find themselves in numerous sexual roles in different contexts at different points in their lives. But whether this is an effective model for ancient sexuality or not, the story does seem to fit into the model presented by heteronormative scholars pretty well. Women with men's sexual desires are trebadas, and men with women's desires are moles mares. In both cases, bodily creation at the dawn of time is the source of their sexuality. There is nothing wrong with a male man who desires to penetrate his partner. Whether that partner is male or female is besides the point, he is performing his socially prescribed sexual role. The female woman who is penetrated by a man or a woman again poses no risk to that sexual order. The problem emerges when there's a mismatch of desire and sexual role. When a woman does the penetrating, or a man is penetrated, a queer interaction has occurred. In this model, we have a scenario where if a man yields to a woman's desires, both partners are actually doing something wrong. The result is just not heteronormative enough for ancient society. Regardless of the sexes of the partners, the desire itself must fit within heteronormative expectations. So, in the beginning, Prometheus and Dionysus created men who are masculine and women who are feminine. These are normal, regular heteronormative people who played the socially acceptable heteronormative roles all throughout their lives. But then Prometheus also created those whose lives were outside of normal heteronormative expectations. These soft men and rubbing women whose bodies and lives could not adhere to those requirements were treated differently in ancient society. The fable implies that gender nonconformity was at least enough a part of ancient life that it merited a comment and a proper mythical origin story. The fable inexorably connects gender nonconformity with sexual characteristics. Sexuality is not an intrusion, but part of the plan from the very beginning. I would also like to draw your attention to Dionysus' role in the story. Bacchus facilitates the creation of gender nonconformity at the very dawn of humanity. All humans who acted in these ways are representative of those original archetypes. Interestingly, Dionysus manages each of these directly. The bearded Dionysus from early and classical Athens, as well as the father Liber from the Roman world, are both masculine men. The embodiment of fruit trees, known as Pomona, and the female Libera are both feminine women. The god of the mysteries, Iakos, and that classical beardless, effeminate Dionysus, those are the feminine males. And then the goddess of initiation, Misa, and the boyish nymph raised by Rea, those are the masculine females. All of these are different masks or faces Dionysus puts on in different ritual contexts. So Dionysus not only helps create all four types of gender, but later Dionysus manifests all four types of gender. Yet Dionysus never settles on any one of them. Even here, at the very birth of sexuality and gender, Dionysus, the androgynous one, sits above all four. They may take part in any one of the four possible options, but never stays on any one. We will return to Dionysus as an archetypal manifestation of gender nonconformity. Next week we're going to start moving through the mythology of the ancient world, finding deities and narratives which represent queer loves. We're going to start with Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Though she was known to have close and intimate connections with her nymphs and dryads, there were some heroines for whom her love burned more intensely than others. In some stories, Artemis was in love with other women. After Artemis is Ganymedes, the archetypal homosexual lover, and Apollo, whose bisexual experiences are mythical. Stick around for the fun. As for Phaedrus himself, we don't know much about him except that he was a freedman living during the reign of Augustus and Tiberius in the first century. The story we use today comes from Book 4, number 16, or Fable No. 516, depending upon the version you're looking at. As so often happens with Greek and Roman mythology, we have many stories of Prometheus creating human beings to work with. The one presented here is the one version of the creation of humanity which clearly demonstrates the creation of homosexuality and heterosexuality too at the dawn of time. The difficulties with interpreting the word trebada, especially as it is one of the very first usages ever recorded of the term, comes from Sandra Boringer, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, translated by Anna Prager in 2021. The original edition was actually published in 2007 in French. The translation of the final line of the fable, Thus Modern Desires Delight in Not Straight Joys, is my own. Many translators, even to this day, interpret this line as a moral condemnation. For example, Gibbs, 2002, in the Oxford Classical Edition says, quote, This is why modern lust revels in perverted pleasures, or Perry, 1965, in the Loeb Classical Library edition, hence, lust now gratifies itself with a perverted pleasure. Finally, Williams, 1999, in Roman Homosexuality, Ideologies of Masculinity, says, and so it is that lust now enjoys its depraved pleasure. All of these versions inject modern interpretation and sensibility onto the ancient documents. My attempt here was to translate it as literally as possible to give you a clear idea of what the Latin is actually trying to say, without moral judgment. The sentiment that the story reflects social deviance and societal degradation is actually shared with many older legacy translations of Phaedrus. Many of them actually omit the story entirely, such as Taylor and Walton's translation in 1845, and Simpkin and Marshall's translation in 1847, or else leave it stand in Latin without any translation at all, such as the Riley and Smart edition of 1887. It kind of stretches the definition of a translation. Translation, if you're omitting certain parts or letting it stand in Latin, but they were clearly trying to shelter their readers by providing censorship for such obvious depravity that the story represents. Much of the discussion conflating homoeroticism with disorders of sexual differentiation is drawn from Holt Parker's The Tetratogenic Grid, page 59, in the book Roman Sexualities, edited by Hallett and Skinner, 1998. The phrase, women endowed with a monstrous clitoris, remains high on the list of phrases you never thought you'd hear in the annals of classical scholarship. The discussion of word order finds its origin in Sandra Boringer's Female Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, page 246 through 247. Her interpretation meshed well with my own interpretation of the story. That's all for now. We'll see you next week.