Author: Douglas Galbi

Theano & Hypermnestra rationalized gender inequality for women

man treating another man's war wound

Men live a significantly shorter lifespan on average than women, and about four times as many men die from violence as do women. At the same time, about fifteen times more men than women are held in prisons. These fundamental anti-men gender inequalities are rationalized and socially obscured in a variety of ways. Hippodameia and Theano in Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica and Hypermnestra in Ovid’s Heroides show how ridiculous claims pass for reason to keep men exposed to vastly greater mortal danger and punishment.

Amid the brutal battle between Trojans and Greeks outside the walls of Troy, the young Trojan woman Hippodameia urged other young Trojan woman to take up “an equal share of fighting.” According to Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, written about 1750 years ago, Hippodameia urged her sister Trojans:

Friends, let the hearts within your breasts be brave,
no less than those of our husbands, who for the fatherland
are fighting the foe on behalf of our children and ourselves
with no relief from suffering. Let us also fill
our hearts with courage and take an equal share of fighting.
We are not far removed from the strength of men.
The vigor that there is in them also is in us.
Our food is the same. So what advantage is given to men
by heaven? Let us then not shrink from battle. [1]

Men being socially used for war is no advantage for men. Asserting otherwise is obfuscatory rhetoric of dominant gynocentric interests. Hippodameia further showed how men’s deaths are rhetorically constructed as relatively unimportant:

Our affliction is such that we can delay no longer
the joining of battle. Better by far to die in the fighting
than afterward to be led with our helpless children
by foreign masters under painful compulsion,
our city in flames and our men no longer living. [2]

Military victory in the ancient world often involved androcide: all the men in the defeated society were killed. The women and children from the defeated society, however, were assimilated into the victorious society.  On any reasonable measure of personal welfare, being alive is better than being dead. The heroic claim “better to die fighting” is reasonable only in the context of men dying whether they fight or surrender. Women have traditionally had much better alternatives than men in war.

Another Trojan woman, Theano, illustrates how women’s privileges persist. After Hippodameia’s speech to them, the Trojan women were impassioned to head onto the battlefield. They were ready to take up “hateful fighting” and to put “their hands to instruments of pain.” Theano, however, dissuaded the Trojan women from shouldering an equal share of the horrendous fighting:

Why this desire to work amid the fearful fighting?
You poor things, you have never worked in a battle before.
In your ignorant keenness for an intolerable task
you rush without a thought. Your strength won’t equal
that of the Danaans {Greeks} who are trained in fighting. [3]

Just because women have never done a horrendous job before, doesn’t mean that women can’t do it. All the dirty, dangerous jobs that men traditionally have done, and continue to do vastly disproportionately, women could do equally. What’s needed is a strong public commitment to bringing about that outcome, or at least a public commitment like that for bringing about gender equality among corporate executives and elite scientists.

Theano smoothly shifted between recognizing the unity of the human race and the diversity of individuals to endorsing the exploitation of men as soldiers. Theano rationalized for the Trojan women:

All humans belong to a single race, and yet the work
that they pursue is varied; that work is the best
which each one plies with understanding in his mind.
Therefore stay away from the noisy battle
and busy yourselves with the looms inside your homes.
War shall be the business of our menfolk. [4]

From an individualistic perspective, each person should choose the job that she finds most suitable for her. Men have various interests and abilities, just as women do. Yet when assigning horrendous jobs, defining crimes, or specifying the last persons off sinking ships, gynocentric society naturalizes disadvantages for men. Underscoring that her arguments for the anti-men gender division of labor are rationalizations, Theano concluded with a contextual rationalization: “there is no desperate need for women to join in the fighting.”[5] In the U.S., such rationalizations have allowed men-only Selective Service registration to persist for decades despite intense public concern for gender equality.

Quintus of Smyrna’s virtuoso display of rationalizations for anti-men gender inequality probably drew on earlier literature. Quintus wrote in Greek, probably in the third century GC. Ovid, writing his Heroides in Latin about the time of Jesus of Nazareth’s birth, included related rationalizations in Hypermnestra’s letter to Lynceus.[6] Hypermenstra’s father Danaus was one of the many men throughout history who have encouraged women to defy traditional gender roles. When an enemy ruler coercively married his fifty sons to Danaus’s fifty daughters, Danaus assigned his daughters the mission of killing their husbands on their wedding night. While her husband was asleep, three times Hypermenstra put a sword to his throat. Yet she balked at her warrior mission:

I am a woman and a maiden, gentle in nature and in years;
Soft hands are not suited to fierce weapons.
…
What crime has been committed by me that I am not allowed to be virtuous?
What have I to do with a sword? What does a girl have to do with warlike weapons?
The wool and the distaff are more suitable for my hands. [7]

The strength of one’s hands has no relevance to killing with a sword a sleeping man. A girl can kill a sleeping man as easily as a man can. Men are no more naturally vicious and evil than women are. Simply because he is a man, a man doesn’t necessarily have anything more to do with warlike weapons than he has to do with wool and distaff. Men are forced to strive to be virtuous in horrible ways. The social construction of gender throughout history has tended to assign killing to men. Yet culpability for killings in war belongs at least equally to women.

Assigning men responsibility for war is a deeply entrenched, brutally oppressive gender inequality. Hippodameia and Theano in Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica and Hypermnestra in Ovid’s Heroides show how rhetorical rationalizations keep men assigned to horrible violence against men. Removing men-only compulsory military registration is merely a small step toward greater emancipation of men and true gender equality.

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Notes:

[1] Quintus of Smyrna. Posthomerica 1.409-19, from Greek trans. James (2007) p. 13. Id. capitalizes the first word of every poetic line. To make the translation more readable for persons not accustomed to reading poetry, I’ve changed the capitalization to that of prose. All quotes from Posthomerica are similarly from id. A.S. Way’s English translation (1913) of the Posthomerica for the Loeb Classical Library is available online.

The text is isn’t clear whether the woman’s name is Hippodameia or Tisiphone. I follow James (2004) in using Hippodameia. Other recent scholarly work uses Tisiphone. The paired speeches of Hippodameia and Theanos about the Trojan women going into battle are “unprecedented in the surviving narratives about the Trojan War.” Maciver (2012b) p. 60.

Hippodameia appealed to the example of the Amazons as women warriors. But that example is inapt. The Amazons hated men. Most Trojan woman, like most women generally, probably didn’t hate men. Moreover, Achilles easily killed Penthesileia in battle. She was the Amazons’ leader and their most proficient warrior. Women should fight not because they hatefully and foolishly seek to be like Amazons, but because they recognize their obligation to uphold the ideal of gender equality.

Dillon notes that Theodorus of Asine, a neo-Platonist philosopher from the first half of the fourth century, presented arguments favoring gender equality. Three of Theodorus of Asine’s arguments are closely related to arguments that Hippodameia and Theano make. Dillon (1995). Dillon fails to recognize how little effect these and many other arguments through the ages have had on anti-men gender inequality.

Making current canonical-form scholarly claims and showing little originality, Boyten describes Penthesileia as a hero modeled on Hector. According to Boyten, Penthesileia is a threat to masculinity and gender:

Her presence threatens not only Achilleus’ masculine heroism, but also the social structure through her impact on women en masse. … Thus, I argue, Penthesileia’s presence and its consequences can be understood in a wider context as exploration not only of, and challenge to {emphasis in original}, gender, but also with regards to other forms of convention, including genre itself.

Boyten (2011) p. 26. For elaboration, see id. Ch. 1. Boyten’s understanding of gender presents no challenge whatsoever to dominant gynocentric ideology.

The Posthomerica has been appreciated as brilliant literature by critics from the late-fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. However, in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Posthomerica was roundly disparaged. Over the past decades, scholars have begun to recognize again its literary merit. On the critical reception, Baumback & Bär (2007i) pp. 15-25. Id. pp. 2-8 dates this epic to the third century GC. Boyten (2011) and Maciver (2012) are more recent, lengthy studies appreciating Quintus’s poetic work.

[2] Posthomerica 1.431-5. Hekabe (Hecuba) envisions a similar fate after the death of her son Paris. Id. 10.380-4.

In the Aeneid, Virgil shows through the example of the Volscian Camilla gynocentrism translated to the battlefield. Camilla, a woman, is the focus of attention when she joins the fighting among the many allies of Turnus. Aeneid 7.803-17. In her death speech, she assumes her own preeminence and issues orders for Turnus. Aeneid 11.823-7. For a reading a Camilla in accordance with dominant gender ideology and the hackneyed academic theme of ambiguity, Becker (1997). For parallels between Virgil’s depiction of Camilla and Quintus’s depiction of Penthesileia, Fratantuono (2016).

[3] Posthomerica 1.451-55. The earlier quotes in the above paragraph are from 1.436 (“hateful fighting”) and 1.446 (“hands to instruments of pain”).

[4] Posthomerica 1.464-9. Quintus associates Theano with Athena through the Theano of Iliad 6.297-310. Homer’s Theano is a priestess of Athena. Given the sophisms of Theano in the Posthomerica, that association seems intended ironically.

Homer provides a straight-forward depiction of women’s privilege in war. In the Odyssey, the Trojan warrior Hector, heading out to fatal battle, tells his wife Andromache:

So please go home and tend to your own tasks,
the distaff and the loom, and keep the women
working hard as well. As for the fighting,
men will see to that, all who were born in Troy
but I most of all.

6.490-3, from Greek trans. Fagles (1990) p. 212.

[5] Posthomerica 1.474. In desperate circumstances, the women of Lavinium fought against the Trojan forces:

Even the mothers strove their utmost — the true love of their native land showed them the way and Camilla was their example. Wildly they hurled missiles from the walls and rushed to do the work of steel with stumps and stakes of oak wood hardened in the fire, longing to be first to die in defense of the walls of their city.

Aeneid 11.891-5, from Latin trans. West (1990) p. 263. On intertextuality of the speeches of Hippodameia (Tisiphone) and Theano with the Aeneid and the Argonautica, Maciver (2012).

[6] The relationship between the Posthomerica and earlier Latin literature has been a matter of scholarly contention. Passages in the Posthomerica are clearly similar to passages in the Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. James (2007). Whether that similarity comes from an earlier, common source or Quintus adapting Virgil and Ovid isn’t clear.

[7] Ovid, Heroides 14.55-6, 64-66, from Latin trans. James M. Hunter.

[image] Man treating another man’s war wound. D. R. Howe (Glencoe, MN) treats the wounds of Private First Class D. A. Crum (New Brighton, PA), “H” Company, 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, during Operation Hue City. Thanks to the U.S.  National Archives and Records Administration and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Baumbach, Manuel, Silvio Bär, eds. with Nicola Dümmler. 2007. Quintus Smyrnaeus: transforming Homer in second Sophistic epic. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter.

Baumbach, Manuel and Silvio Bär. 2007i. “An Introduction to Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica.” Pp. 1-26 in Baumbach, Bär & Dümmler (2007).

Becker, Trudy Harrington, 1997. “Ambiguity and the Female Warrior: Vergil’s Camilla.” Electronic Antiquity 4:1.

Boyten, Bellini. 2011. Epic journeys: studies in the reception of the hero and heroism in Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica. Ph. D. Thesis, University College London.

Dillon, John M. 1995. “The equality of the sexes: variations on a rhetorical theme in the fourth century AD.” Hermathena. 158: 27-35.

Fagles, Robert, trans. 1990. Homer. The Iliad. New York, N.Y.: Viking.

Fratantuono, Lee M. 2016. “The Penthesilead of Quintus Smyrnaeus: A Study in Epic Reversal.” Wiener Studien, Zeitschrift für Klassische Philologie und Patristik, forthcoming.

James, Alan, trans. 2004. Quintus of Smyrna. The Trojan epic: Posthomerica. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.

James, Alan. 2007. “Quintus of Smyrna and Virgil — A Matter of Prejudice.” Pp. 145-57 in Baumbach, Bär & Dümmler (2007).

Maciver, Calum Alasdair. 2012. Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica: engaging Homer in late antiquity. Leiden: Brill. (review)

Maciver, Calum A. 2012b. “Representative Bees in Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica.” Classical Philology. 107 (1): 53-69.

West, David, trans. 1990. Virgil. The Aeneid. London, England: Penguin Books.

Omphale pummeled Hercules: not just ancient Greek myth

Hercules was sold as a slave to the Lydian queen Omphale. Their relationship became like that of a wife and husband. About 1850 years ago, Lucian explained:

No doubt you have seen some picture of him: he is Omphale’s slave, dressed up in an absurd costume, his lion-skin and club transferred to her, as though she were the true Heracles, while he, in saffron robe and purple jacket, is combing wool and wincing under Omphale’s slipper. [1]

The phrase “wincing under Omphale’s slipper” refers to Omphale beating Hercules with her slipper. Domestic violence against men, like violence against men generally, tends to be ignored or trivialized. Yet ancient literature has preserved evidence of the extent and seriousness of domestic violence against men.

Omphale abusing Hercules

An epigram from fourth-century Alexandria takes a no-nonsense approach to domestic violence against men. It forthrightly recognizes women’s rule, which many scholars still refuse to recognize today. It also declares the pervasiveness of domestic violence against men despite men’s own shameful denials:

If you boast that you don’t in any way obey your wife’s orders, you are talking nonsense, for you are not made of tree or stone, as the saying is. You suffer what most or all of us suffer: you are ruled by a woman. But if you say, “She doesn’t smack me with her slipper, nor do I have an unchaste wife whom I must put up with and shut my eyes,” then I say your servitude is milder than that of others. You have sold yourself to a chaste and not very severe mistress. [2]

Societies typically restrict and punish domestic violence against men to a much lesser extent than domestic violence against women. If men and women have an equal propensity to engage in illegitimate violence, then with social control biased toward punishing men, women are more likely to engage in domestic violence than men are.

Men’s lack of assertiveness toward women contributes to domestic violence against men. About 2000 years ago, a Roman poet preserved an account of the young lover Chaerestratus’s relationship with the courtesan Chrysis. That account underscores men’s psychological vulnerability to domestic violence. Chaerestratus confides to his slave Davus:

“Davus, very soon — I’m absolutely serious — I intend to put my agonies behind me.” Chaerestratus says this, chewing his bleeding fingernail. “Why should I embarrass my sober relations with my scandalous behaviour? Why should I wreck my inheritance at that filthy threshold by getting a bad reputation, drunkenly singing with my torch gone out in front of Chrysis’ dripping door?”

“Well done, lad. Be wise, slaughter a lamb for the gods who drive evil away.”

“But, Davus, do you think she’ll cry if I leave her?”

“You’re messing about! You’ll get a beating from her red slipper, lad, to stop you struggling and gnawing at her tight nets. Now you are fierce and violent, but if she called you, right away you’d say, ‘Whatever shall I do, then? Not go, even now, when she invites me and positively begs me?’ No, if you have got away whole and in one piece, don’t go even now.” [3]

Despite Chrysis beating him, Chaerestratus struggled to refuse her summons. To reduce domestic violence, men must learn to stand up to women psychologically, to set boundaries, and to have enough self-respect and self-confidence to leave a woman and not come back.

As the example of Hercules shows, any man, no matter how strong, can be a victim of domestic violence against men. Men are reluctant to defend themselves physically against women. Moreover, using objects and attacking an intimate partner when he is physically vulnerable, even the smallest, weakest woman can do a man serious harm. That obvious reality is denied to shame and blame men victims:

On a man who used to be hit by his wife

Given that you claim descent from the line of Barbatus in order that ferocious Varitinna may be related to you, why are your temples beaten by a lady’s slipper, and why has your little goatee fallen out, plucked by her demeaning hand? Stop at once pretending that you have heroic ancestors and that the strength of a fierce line courses in your limbs. She is rather the descendant of the Salautensian line, who has the courage to lay low her husband with her heel. [4]

This epigram, probably from early sixth-century Vandal north Africa, despicably illustrates victim blaming and shaming. A descendant of a proud line of warriors may experience domestic violence. That is a painful reality. Ridiculing the suffering of such men is truly shameful.

Myths about Hercules are more worthy of being taken seriously than are domestic violence myths widely disseminated through authoritative channels in recent decades. The completely absurd claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women has appeared many times in newspaper articles, law reviews, judicial opinions, and congressional records. The apotheosis of Hercules is more plausible than that claim. Modern myths about domestic violence mainly deploy crude stereotypes. Ancient myths about Hercules, in contrast, are creative and wide-ranging. Modern myths about domestic violence have enormously damaged human relationships and human institutions. Ancient myths about Hercules broadly enrich understanding of the human condition. To better understand the serious problem of domestic violence, think about Omphale pummeling Hercules.

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Notes:

[1] Lucian, Quomodo Historia Conscribenda Sit (The Way to Write History) 10, from Greek trans. H.W. and F.G. Fowler (1905). Heracles is an ancient Greek hero who in Roman myth was known as Hercules. Omphale lived in Lydia (in present-day Turkey). Hercules served at least a year as a slave to Omphale. At some point they had a son. The name of their son is variously recorded as Lamos, Agelaus, and Tyrsenus.

In Lucian, Dialogi Deorum (Dialogues of the Gods) 15 (13), Asclepius declares to Hercules, “I was never a slave like you, never combed wool in Lydia, masquerading in a purple shawl and being slippered by an Omphale.” Trans. id. Ancient Greek includes a specific term for whacking with a slipper: βλαυτοω.

Latin literature refers to Omphale beating Hercules with her slipper and to domestic violence against men more generally. In Terence, Eunuchus ll. 1078 (Act 5, Scene 7), Gnatho expresses in an aside his wish that Thais would beat her lover Thraso (“I only wish I may see your head stroked down with a slipper”). Trans. Henry Thomas Riley (1874). In Ovid, Heroides 9.73-4, Deianira writes to Hercules, “You are said … to have been afraid at the threats of your mistress.” Trans. James M. Hunter (2013). In Turpilius, fragment 147, a man refers to a woman beating his head with a sandal.

The strength of Hercules in wrestling with Antaeus contrasts with his weakness in wrestling with Omphale, called Iole below:

Hercules endured the wrestling match
with Libyan Antaeus,
checking the trickery
of the bogus fall
by stopping him from falling.
But Hercules, the mighty son of Jove,
the one who so disentangled
the knotted entanglements of their wrestling,
was conquered and bound
when he fell for the embraces
of Iole.

{ Antaei Libyci
luctam sustinuit,
casus sophistici
fraudes cohibuit,
cadere dum vetuit.
Sed qui sic explicuit
luctae nodosos nexus,
vincitur, et vincitur,
dum labitur
magna Iovis soboles
ad Ioles
amplexus. }

Carmina Burana 63, “Hercules’s efforts long ago {Olim sudor Herculis},” st. 3a, Latin text and English translation (modified slightly) from Traill (2018).

[2] Palladas, Greek Anthology 10.55, from Greek trans. Paton (1920), adapted slightly for clarity.

[3] Persius 5.161-74, from Latin trans. Braund (2004) p. 111. Although the text is written as satire, it captures aspects of reality that are difficult to express otherwise.

[4] Anthologia Latina 145 (R156), from Latin trans. Kay (2006) p. 273. The victim services organization whiteribbon.org has commendables rejected anti-men bigotry in domestic violence services. It is one of the rare domestic violence organizations that clearly rejects sex discrimination against men victims.

[image] Omphale abusing Hercules. Painting by Peter Paul Rubens, 1603. Held in Louvre Museum, Paris. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Braund, Susanna Morton, trans. 2004. Juvenal and Persius. Loeb Classical Library 91. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kay, N. M. 2006. Epigrams from the Anthologia Latina: text, translation and commentary. London: Duckworth.

Paton, W.R. 1920. The Greek Anthology with an English Translation. London: William Heinemann (vol. I, bks. 1-6; vol. II, bks. 7-8; vol. III, bk. 9; vol IV, bks. 10-12; vol. V, bks. 13-16).

Traill, David A. 2018, ed. and trans. Carmina Burana. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 48-49. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

erasing woman raping man: the old virgin in Codex Salmasianus

Apparently unknown for nearly a thousand years, Luxorius brilliant, transgressive collection of epigrams have survived in only one manuscript. Luxorius seems to have authored his epigrams early in the sixth century GC. A manuscript containing 91 of Luxorius’s epigrams was written in the late seventh or early eighth century. That manuscript is called the Codex Salmasianus. Luxorius’s epigram collection apparently was unknown until the Codex Salmasianus was found and presented to a prominent scholar in 1615.[1] Yet establishing what Luxorius wrote still requires careful study and analysis.

Codex Salmasianus: Luxorius epigram on old virgin woman

How many generations of copies separate the Codex Salmasianus from Luxorius’s autograph or dictated manuscript isn’t known. When scribes copied texts, they sometimes made mistakes. Moreover, scribes would sometimes change text to reflect their views of what should be written. A scholar of Luxorius’s poetry stated in 1961:

the text became more and more corrupt in the course of successive copying and recopying. Copious emendations were required; much work in that respect still remains. [2]

A scholarly work published in 2011 explained, “reading of many passages is still a matter of debate.”

Behavioral philology can help to elucidate Luxorius’s text. The fundamental principle of behavioral philology is that stable patterns exist in human discourse across thousands of years. Human biology and human groups have considerable stability across thousands of years. Language emerged within that biological-cultural stability.[3] Behavioral philology brings to the reading of ancient manuscripts insights from current, deeply rooted patterns of discourse.

Consider Luxorius’s epigram “To an aged virgin who is getting married.” Here’s an English translation of the best current Latin reading, along with a proposed emendation (in parentheses) of the last line:

To an aged virgin who is getting married

Virgin, whom Phlegethon calls his sister,
old enough that you could be Saturn’s parent,
you whom Nyx and Erebus and Chaos bore,
with many heavy wrinkles as numerous as your years,
you to whom an elephant gave his face and skin,
whose mother was an old monkey who gave birth
to you in the fields of Libya when the world was new,
who long ago fittingly, in the place of Ceres’s daughter,
could have been given as wife to Dis to live among the dead:
why do you burn with such wanton passion,
now and for some time since death for you has been all that remains?
Is it that you yearn for a large inscription on your tomb,
so that widespread fame will thus speak of you:
old woman raped by a guilty man
(old woman guilty of raping man)

{In vetulam virginem nubentem

Virgo, quam Phlegethon vocat sororem,
Saturni potior parens senecta,
quam Nox atque Erebus tulit Chaosque,
cui rugae totidem graves, quot anni,
cui vultus elefans dedit cutemque,
mater simia quam creavit arvis
grandaeva in Libycis novo sub orbe,
olim quae decuit marita Diti
pro nata Cereris dari per umbras:
quis te tam petulans suburit ardor,
nunc cum iam exitium tibi supersit?
An hoc pro titulo cupis sepulcri,
Ut te cognita fama sic loquatur,
quod stuprata viro est anus nocenti
(quod stupratus vir est anu nocenti)} [4]

Combining learned classical allusions with animal imagery, Luxorius’s epigram ridicules a lustful old woman who has never had sex. While anyone daring to utter such words today would be harshly punished, freedom of expression was much greater under the Roman emperors and within the early Islamic caliphates. Yet the last line in the epigram, as received in the Codex Salmasianus, makes no sense in context. Why would a man rape an ugly, lustful old woman? Even if a man were to do that, what does such action have to do with the rest of the epigram?

Behavioral philology provides a clear answer. The best available statistics on rape today show that men raping women is about as prevalent as women raping men. The former issue is widely described as a major public problem. The latter issue is commonly ignored. Public discourse is strongly biased toward declaring men to be rapists, and ignoring women raping men under the same meaning of words. A female teacher sexually abusing a middle-school boy and receiving no jail time attracts almost no mainstream media attention.[5] Such a communicative effect can best be understood as a deeply rooted bias of gynocentric society. Such bias can easily account for a scribe re-writing the last line of Luxorius’s epigram to change a woman raping a man into a man raping a woman. Behavioral philology provides reasonable grounds for emending the last line to reverse its subject and object.

Luxorius himself is unlikely to have obscured women raping men. In a poem about Marina, Luxorius celebrated and honored men’s sexuality in a context associated with falsely accusing men of rape. Luxorius taunted a woman for hating men. Moreover, Luxorius was unafraid to challenge and expose corrupt intellectual practices. Even narrowly within the received Latin text of the epigram, the titular, sepulchral inscription “old woman raped by a guilty man” subverts itself. The “guilty man” is a presumptive construct of anti-men bias in discussing rape.

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Notes:

[1] For discussion of the textual record of Luxorius’s epigrams, Rosenblum (1961) pp. 97-108. A few of Luxorius’s epigrams appear in other manuscripts dating from the late ninth through the eleventh centuries.

[2] Id. p. 102. The subsequent quote is from Wasyl (2011) p. 170, n. 32.

[3] Henrich (2013) Ch. 13.

[4] Anthologia Latina 296, Latin text from Wasyl (2011) p. 198, my translation with help from the translations of Rosenblum (1961), p. 121, and Beck (2012), p. 47. Rosenblum and Beck number the poem 15. In Riese & Shackleton Bailey (1982), this epigram is n. 296; in Reise (1894), n. 301. I’ve used the Wasyl text, with minor changes to editorial paratext, as the best version of the text according to the most current scholarship. The Latin texts in all these versions are nearly identical. The titles to Luxorius’s epigrams are thought to be later additions.

Rosumblum translated the last line of Luxorius’s epigram as: ‘“Old lady raped by a sex criminal”?’ Rosenblum (1961) p. 121. The quotation marks and question mark are editorial, as is clear from the manuscript image above. While providing the Latin text but no specific translation note, Beck translated the final line as: ‘“Here lies an old woman, convicted of raping a man”?’ Beck (2012) p. 47. Beck thus reversed what a leading classical scholar has described as the clear meaning of the received Latin text. Beck’s poetic insight, however, is penetrating.

[5] The structural anti-men bias has produced astonishing effects. Under the operation of current U.S. law, men are forced to pay “child support” to their rapists, e.g., the case of a 15-year-old boy whom a female teacher raped.

[image] Codex Salmasianus, last eight lines (ll. 7-14) from Luxorius’s epigram Virgo, quam Phlegethon vocat sororem. The scribe mis-ordered lines 4-7 as {6,7,4,5}. In the final line, the scribe corrected the final e with a faint line through it and with an i inserted above the final t. In addition, Claude Saumaise (Salmasius), the scholar who received the text in 1615, corrected stubrata to stuprata in the final line. In the image, see the caret (^) above the s of stubrata, and stuprata written in the left margin. Detail from p. 162 in Anthologia latina {Anthologie dite de Saumaise}, Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin 10318, ark:/12148/btv1b8479004f. Thanks to BnF’s Gallica.

References:

Beck, Art, trans. 2012. Luxorius. Opera omnia or, a Duet for Sitar and Trombone. Los Angeles: Otis Books | Seismicity Editions.

Henrich, Joseph. 2015. The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Riese, Alexander, and David R. Shackleton Bailey. 1982. Anthologia latina: sive poesis latinae supplementum. Pars. 1. Carmina in codicibus scripta. Fasc. 1. Libri Salmasiani aliorumque carmina. Stutgardiae: In aedibus Teubneri. Online prior edition: Riese (1894).

Rosenblum, Morris. 1961. Luxorius: a Latin poet among the Vandals; together with a text of the poems and an English translation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wasyl, Anna Maria. 2011. Genres rediscovered: studies in Latin miniature epic, love elegy, and epigram of the Romano-Barbaric age. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press.

more than six months incarceration for not paying “child support”

USA: incarceration nation

The Court of Appeals of New York State, the highest court in the State, recently authorized incarceration for more than a six months for not paying “child support.” Men have no reproductive rights whatsoever. Men are also subject to state-institutionalized cuckolding and enormous anti-men bias in child custody proceedings. These weighty legal burdens constraint men’s freedom to engage in consensual sex of reproductive type. The court’s decision further disproportionately burdens men’s sexuality.

Law, policy, and public discussion concerning “child support” is filled with twisted words and deceptive statements. “Child support” doesn’t mean loving and supporting a child in the many ways in which children need support. “Child support” means one adult paying money to another adult, with no legal obligation on the recipient of that payment to spend it in any particular way. Moreover, the magnitude of the state-mandated payments between adults has no relation to the actual monetary needs of a child. The payments are indexed to the relevant adult’s income, not a child’s monetary needs. The state-mandated payments between adults are based on legal establishment of parenthood. For a man, that can mean nothing more than having sex one night with a woman and then years later being informed that she had a child and that he has been legally designated as the father of the child. “Child support” is actually a bizarre, income-based sex tax vastly disproportionately imposed on men. In a civilized, rational, law-based society, courts would refuse to use the deceptive term “child support.”

In its decision, the highest court in New York State buttressed the web of public deception about “child support.” The court began its discussion of the case with the observation:

Enforcing child support obligations has long been a priority in New York.

Is there any rational basis for that priority other than anti-men animus? In the U.S. in 2008, 19% of children lived in poverty. Prioritizing enforcement of child support obligations has had little effect on the large problem of child poverty. The child support system is designed to uphold family income inequality. It supports financially interested adults. A decent respect for justice should make judges reluctant to authorize more punishment within a patently unjust, grossly discriminatory system. The court ignored these problems, in accordance with dominant elite practice, and pretended that they don’t have any relevance to justice.

The court emphasized that the father “willfully” did not pay child support impositions. Like the “best interests of the child” farce, claims about “willfully” did not pay are obfuscatory. Willfully refusing to pay could mean refusing to transfer financial resources above a level necessary for a minimal standard of living for oneself. While that’s a common-sense interpretation of willfully refusing to pay, it has little practical relevance. A court can simply seize a portion of a person’s financial resources and transfer them to another person. Willingness to pay becomes an issue when a judge believes that a person could acquire financial resources, e.g. get a job or get a better paying job, but hasn’t. Hence “willfully did not pay” actually means that person failed to meet the state-determined quota for income earning imposed on him. “Willfully did not pay” often means that the state willfully imposed too high of an income-earning quota and willfully impeded lowering of the income-earning quota.

Imprisoning persons for non-payment of child support isn’t likely to increase their ability or willingness to pay child support. Prisoners have very little opportunity to earn money. Yet child support obligations continue to accrue, with punitive interest rates, while a child-support debtor is imprisoned. A person imprisoned for child support debt ends his prison term with much greater child support debt and much worse job-market prospects as an ex-prisoner. Incarceration thus increases the problem of child support debt. Moreover, a man demoralized with the injustices of the child support system is likely to be even more disgusted with those injustices after he finishes a spell of debtor’s imprisonment. Incarceration may make persons with a sense of justice even less willing to make extraordinary effort to pay patently unjust child support debts.

Justice in the child support system means nothing. The recent decision of New York State’s highest court to extend child-support debtors’ imprisonment beyond six months underscores that travesty of justice.

imprisoned man

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Notes:

The court decision discussed above is Court of Appeals of New York State, No. 82, In the Matter of Columbia County Support Collection Unit, &c., Respondent, v. Joshua A. Risley, Appellant (decided June 7, 2016). Here’s analysis of “child support” in New York State, with realistic scenarios. Mainstream media covers this decision, if at all, as merely a technical matter of far less public importance than transgender bathrooms and the sex ratio among elite scientists. Philip Greenspan’s blog, which is far superior to any other news outlet in investigative and muckraking journalism on the child support system, covered this case.

Child-support servitude and child-support incarceration, which is a form of corvée, attracts little attention. For example, a detailed analysis of Babylonian servility observed:

Even in the United States, infamous for its incarceration rates of the poor, no one can be jailed for owing past-due taxes, only for cheating on their taxes or committing tax fraud.

Tenney (2017) p. 721. Poor persons in the U.S. are jailed for having past-due sex taxes (“child support”) even without the benefit of legal counsel.

[images] (1) USA: Incarceration Nation. Image thanks to Babawawa on Pixabay, CCO Public Domain. (2) Old man in Fort Dodge Jail, Dodge City, Kansas. Thanks to J. Stephen Conn on flickr. Image available under CC By NC 2.0.

Reference:

Tenney, Jonathan S. 2017. “Babylonian Populations, Servility, and Cuneiform Records.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 60 (6): 715-787.