marginal voices of men in the Roman Empire

Roman-era head of Greek god Serapis

Marginal voices of men in the Roman Empire can be heard through informal inscriptions.  Sometime before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 GC, someone inscribed in Latin on a wall in Pompeii:

I don’t want to sell my husband, not for all the gold in the world. [1]

Was the writer a woman telling the world how much she loves her husband?  Enjoy that sweet thought, but it’s probably not true.  The premise of the inscription is that the wife owns the husband like slaves were owned in the Roman Empire.  In expressing appreciation for her husband, a Roman woman almost surely wouldn’t figure her husband as a slave that she could sell.  The person who wrote that inscription more plausibly was a man sarcastically noting a wife treating her husband like a slave.

Other inscriptions at Pompeii express that what men want is sex.  Inscriptions record men achieving sex:

  • I screwed a lot of girls here.
  • Apelles Mus and his brother Dexter each pleasurably had sex with two girls twice.
  • Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here.  The women did not know of his presence.  Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion. [2]

The voices of men seeking sex and achieving sex play loudly in men’s and women’s understandings of men.

Voices of men wanting more than sex are less easily heard.  Another inscription at Pompeii reads:

Weep, you girls.  My penis has given you up.  Now it penetrates men’s behinds.  Goodbye, wondrous femininity! [3]

The phrase “goodbye, wondrous femininity” strikes a sarcastic note much like that of “I don’t want to sell my husband, not for all the gold in the world.”  “Weep, you girls.  My penis has given you up” is a remarkable male assertion of male sexual value.  It contrasts sharply with the inscription suggesting that all women should have access to the stallion Floronius’ sexuality.  Social systems in which women’s sexual opportunities are much richer than men’s devalue men’s sexuality.  They also tend to reduce men’s person to an animal nature like that of a stallion.  Voices of men asserting the value of male sexuality and wanting more than just sex surely exist, but they are small, quiet, and generally ignored.

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Notes:

Inscription source:  The inscriptions at Pompeii are given in English translation on the web page “Graffiti from Pompeii.”  That source admirably provides, for each inscription, a reference to where the inscription was found: region.insula.door number (verbal description).  That source then provides the inscription number in the scholarly source Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL), Volume 4.  Shelton (1998) provides, in English translation, Roman-era texts selected and arranged in accordance with the demands of contemporary academic orthodoxy and the college book marketplace. Id. pp. 98-99 provides a selected collection of Pompeian inscriptions.  The collection doesn’t include the last inscription quoted above.

[1]  Inscription reference: VII.2.48 (House of Caprasius Primus), CI 3061. Here’s the CIL page image.  Click on the image of the page, and then on the “enlarge” icon in the upper right corner to be able to read the page.  These inscriptions are commonly called graffiti.  The term graffiti is now associated with illicit inscriptions.  The regulation of inscriptions in the Roman Empire isn’t known and may have been much different from such regulation in current high-income democratic societies.  To avoid potentially inappropriate regulatory connotations, I use the term inscriptions rather than graffiti.  Formal inscriptions were prevalent in the ancient Greco-Roman world.  The inscriptions discussed here are informal inscriptions.  They are marginal voices relative to the prevalent formal inscriptions.

[2] Inscriptions references (three in order listed above): VII.12.18-20 (the Lupinare), CIL 2175;  Herculaneum (bar/inn joined to the maritime baths), CIL 10678; II.7 (gladiator barracks), CIL 8767.

[3] Inscription reference: I.2.20 (Bar/Brothel of Innulus and Papilio), CIL 3932.

[image] Head of Serapis, from 1st-century Roman Egypt (Baliana).  Marble, from the collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore  (23.120).  The head appears to have been part of a huge, seated statue.  The head illustrates the opposite of marginal voices of men.

Reference:

Shelton, Jo-Ann. (1998). As the Romans did: a sourcebook in Roman social history, 2’nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

traumatic impact to a man’s genitals isn’t funny

With insightful and under-appreciated media analysis, FedEx in a 2005 Super Bowl advertisement identified ten items needed for a television advertisement to be top-ranked.[1]  One of those items was a kick to a man’s groin.  Assaults and other traumatic impacts to a man’s genitals are a staple of media action and humor.  For example, the 2004 Super Bowl television broadcast included a Bud Light advertisement in which a man prompts his dog to rush up to another man and bite him in the genitals.[2]  The 2008 Super Bowl television broadcast featured an advertisement in which Justin Timberlake gets his crotch rammed against a post repeatedly.  Super Bowl advertising spots are the most expensive advertising spots available to advertisers.  Exploiting traumatic impact to a man’s genitals doesn’t provoke outrage about abuse of men, but rather helps to sell products.

Traumatic impact to one’s genitals is a common experience for boys.  A representative, scientific survey conducted in 1992 estimated that 7% to 11% of boys ages 10 to 16 experienced at least one assault on their genitals in the prior year.[3]  A representative, scientific survey conducted in 2002 estimated that about 8% of boys ages 2 to 17 experienced at least one assault on their genitals in the prior year.[4]  Most men have probably experienced at some point in their lives an assault on their genitals.  Such assaults are barely recognized as a public problem.

A major reduction in traumatic impacts to boy’s and men’s genitals would require a fundamental social revaluation of males.  That’s unlikely to occur.  Nonetheless, individuals can still exercise some freedom.  Honor and cherish men’s genitals!

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Notes:

[1]  The ten items for advertising success identified in the FedEx advertisement:

  1. celebrity
  2. animal
  3. dancing animal
  4. cute kid
  5. groin kick
  6. talking animal
  7. attractive females
  8. product message
  9. famous song
  10. bonus ending

The “groin kick” is more accurately described as a “kick to a man’s groin.” Showing a sexual assault on a woman wouldn’t lead to advertising success. While this FedEx advertisement obviously is meant to be humorous, its media analysis is quite accurate.

[2] This advertisement is widely available on the web and apparently remains popular.  It’s commonly described as a banned Super Bowl commercial.  That’s not correct.  This advertisement was actually shown during the 2004 Super Bowl television broadcast.

[3] Finkelhor and Wolak (1995) p. 1694 shows point estimates of 9.2% and 9.1%, with 95% confidence intervals of 7.5% to 11.0% and 7.1% to 11.2% for the first interview and follow-up interview (which occurred on average 15 months later). The corresponding figures for girls are point estimates of 1.0% and 2.2%, with 95% confidence intervals of 0.4% to 1.6% and 1.1% to 3.3%.

[4] Finkelhor et al. (2005) p. 9, Table 1, shows point estimates of 7.8% and 2.9% for boys and girls, respectively. No confidence intervals by sex are given.  For children not differentiated by sex, nonsexual assaults on genitals increase significantly across the age groups 2 to 5 years old, 6 to 12 years old, and 13 to 17 years old.  Id.  The wider age span in this study contributes to a lower overall estimate of assaults on genitals.  Moreover, since such assaults are less likely to be sex differentiated for children ages 2 to 5 years, the wider age span also implies less of a gender protrusion in assaults on boys’ genitals relative to assaults on girls’ genitals.

References:

Finkelhor, David, Richard Ormrod, Heather Turner, and Sherry Hamby. 2005. “The Victimization of Children and Youth: A Comprehensive, National Survey.”  Child Maltreatment. 10 (1): 5-25.

Finkelhor David, and Janice Wolak. 1995. “Nonsexual assaults to the genitals in the youth population.”  JAMA: the Journal of the American Medical Association. 274 (21): 1692-7.

qadi criminal justice in comparative perspective

The U.S. criminal justice system features unlimited prosecutorial discretion, justice by plea bargaining unconstrained by due process of law, and mass incarceration with a world-leading number of person incarcerated per capita.  A leading scholar of the U.S. criminal justice system has declared that it has “run off the rails” and collapsed.  Another legal scholar describes the situation thus:

If the system is doing justice now, it is by accident – the accident that particular prosecutors bargain prudently and humanely. There is good reason to doubt that this happy accident is really taking place. And even if executive discretion produces now something tolerably close to justice, the grotesque concentration of power in so few hands conflicts directly with the rule of law. The system we have is far too close to “kadi justice” for comfort. [1]

The reference to “kadi justice” is an allusion to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949).  In that opinion, Justice Frankfurter declared:

This is a court of review, not a tribunal unbounded by rules.  We do not sit like a kadi under a tree dispensing justice according to considerations of individual expediency.

The rule of law and justice in the criminal justice system are crucially important public issues.  Considering them in current U.S. circumstances can easily prompt despair.  What to do?

In accordance with enlightenment faith in reason, I will analyze Justice Frankfurter’s reference to “kadi justice.”  A qadi (kadi) is a judge ruling under Islamic law.  By the fourteenth century, Islamic law was well-respected, highly codified knowledge. Ibn Battuta, a visitor to the Maldives, became a qadi there by displaying his knowledge of Islamic law.  Battuta recorded in his journal his key concern as qadi: “When I became qadi, I strove with all my might to establish the rule of law.”[2] Islamic legal scholars worked to keep Islamic law unchanged from the seventh century and uniform across the Islamic world.  A qadi’s persona and public decisions represented the grandeur of Islamic tradition and the depth of Islamic legal scholarship.  Sitting under a tree dispensing justice according to considerations of individual expediency would be completely inconsistent with the self-conception and public perception of a qadi.[3]

Looking back over unenlightened ages and cultures, the image of an official sitting under a tree dispensing justice according to individual expediency fits most directly King Louis IX in thirteenth-century France.  A famous account tells of King Louis IX frequently sitting under an oak tree in the woods of Vincennes and dispensing justice directly to his subjects in accordance with his absolute royal sovereignty.  King Louis IX was not a legal scholar.  He did not strive to administer justice according to an unchanging, uniform corpus of written law and legal interpretations.  He probably sought to treat petitioners fairly in their particular circumstances, according to his own personal sense of fairness.  That’s not the sense of rule of law in our age of enlightenment.

Present-day U.S. prosecutors dispense justice much more like King Louis IX in thirteenth-century France than like a qadi in the ancient Islamic world.  Making the U.S. criminal justice system more just can start with true enlightenment.

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Notes:

[1] Dripps (2005) p. 1159.

[2] Trans. Dunn (1986) p. 234.

[3] For roughly the past half-millennium, weaknesses in the administration of justice under Islamic law have been the opposite of excessive legal discretion and lack of legal uniformity and stability.  Weaknesses of Islamic law over the past half-millennium are much better characterized as too little freedom for interpretation (ijtihad) and too little experimentation.  Too little experimentation can be interpreted as lack of confidence that God is sufficiently great to create human beings who will, at least eventually, freely discover the truth about God and the world.

References:

Dripps, Donald A. (2005). “Overcriminalization, Discretion, Waiver: A Survey of Possible Exit Strategies.” Penn State Law Review v. 109. pp. 1155-1179.

Dunn, Ross E. (1986). The adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim traveler of the fourteenth century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

building a fire on a whale-turtle island

a sea-bird saw the whale-turtle island sink

More than a millennium ago, a story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island was known across the span of Iran, Russia, England, Egypt, and Ethiopia.  A version of that story exists in the Physiologus, a second-to-fourth-century didactic Greek Christian text from Alexandria (Egypt).  A Latin translation made between the fourth and sixth centuries tells the story thus:

Physiologus spoke of a certain whale in the sea called the aspidoceleon {asp-turtle} that is exceedingly large like an island, heavier than sand, and is a figure of the devil.  Ignorant sailors tie their ships to the beast as to an island and plant their anchors and stakes in it.  They light their cooking fires on the whale but, when he feels the heat, he urinates and plunges into the depths, sinking all the ships.  You also, O man, if you fix and bind yourself to the hope of the devil, he will plunge you along with himself into hell-fire.[1]

A whale “urinating” and plunging into the depths seems to correspond to a whale blowing through its blowhole and then diving.  More generally, the Physiologus seems to have added  to earlier observations of nature broader interpretations, more abstract symbolic understandings, and moral teachings.[2]  The Physiologus was translated into Ethiopic, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, and Old Church Slavonic from the fifth to tenth centuries.  A version of the story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island appears in the didactic Old English poem “The Whale,” preserved in the tenth-century Exeter Book.[3]  Its source is almost surely a version of the Physiologus.  By the tenth century, the Physiologus was one of the most widely known books in western Eurasia.[4]

sailors mistakenly land on a whale

In the tenth century, along the Persian Gulf in present-day Iran, a sea captain recounted a different version of the story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island.  The sea captain claimed that he heard the story from another who said that he heard it from an old sailor.  In this Persian-Arabic version, some Persian sailors sailing from India encountered a strong storm that damaged their ship.  They managed to land on a small island containing no wood or water.  By the time they repaired their ship, the date had turned to the Persian New Year’s Day.  That meant celebrating the feast of Nowruz:

to celebrate it, {the sailors} took on to the island all the bits of wood they could find in the ship, palm leaves, and material, and set fire to them.  All of a sudden the island began to tremble.  As they were not far from the water, they threw themselves in and climbed aboard {their ship}.  Immediately the island sank into the sea, with such turbulence that they were almost drowned and had great difficulty in reaching safety.  They were filled with great terror.  For the island was nothing but a turtle asleep on the sea.  It had fled when it was awoken by the burning fire. [5]

The source for this story is probably the Physiologus.  However, the Physiologus’ didactic allegory of staking a new residence on top of the devil was transmitted to the Persian sea caption as just a sailor’s tale of wonder.  Scholarly literature in the ancient Islamic world often added moral teaching to earlier Greek stories.  The sea captain’s story shows moral teaching being discarded in the much different discursive circumstances of folk entertainment.[6]

The reception of the Physiologus’ story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island points to more general communications economics.  The Physiologus’ success in ancient communications markets benefited from both its moral orthodoxy and its entertainment value.  Its moral orthodoxy ensured that elites would employ scribes to copy it. Its stories of natural wonders, which could easily be shorn from its moral instruction, supported popular demand for it.  The Physiologus thus had a market position somewhat similar to college education in the U.S. today.

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Notes:

[1] Physiologus, XXXI. On the Whale, that is, the Aspidoceleon, trans. Curley (1979) pp. 45-6.  A less detailed version of the story occurs in a letter, on marvels of India, purportedly from Alexander to Aristotle (part of the Greek Alexander romance).  An account of the story that refers to the heat of cooking provoking the animal is included in the Babylonian Talmud.  See Hansen (2002) pp. 180-1. Al-Jāhiz (d. 869) in his Book of Animals criticizes sailors’ tales.  He refers to this story as the most fabulous and preposterous of them all (vol. VII, pp. 33-4).  Grunebaum (1953) p. 300.

[2] Aristotle’s History of Animals and Pliny’s Natural History are examples of earlier works providing much less abstractly interpreted descriptions of nature.  The former describes whales having blowholes, through which water was expelled (Bk 4, Ch. 10; Bk. 8, Ch. 2).  The latter describes massive sea creatures in the Indian Ocean (Bk. 9, Chs. 3-4).  With respect to more abstractly interpreted work, the Zoroastrian Avesta Yasna includes an account of the hero Keresaspa, “a youth of great ascendant, curly-haired, bludgeon-bearing,” cooking food on top of a beast.  The beast, scorched by the heat, flees, overturning the cooking pot and also putting to flight the hero-cook.  See Yasna, Ch. 9, sec. 11.  The Physiologus’ story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island differs significantly in setting and action from the Yasna’s story.  Contrary to the claim of Curley (1979) p. 83, I don’t think it likely that the Physiologus’ story has its germ in India from the Yasna’s story.  Note the peculiarity of Keresaspa being described as “curly-haired.”  Curly hair is much more characteristic of Africans and Greeks than Indians.  Perhaps describing Keresaspa as “a youth of great ascendant, curly-haired, bludgeon-bearing” indicates that the Avesta Yasna drew material from stories associated with Alexander the Great.

[3] Trans. Cook (1921).

[4] See Curley (1979), Introduction.  The Physiologus was commonly incorporated into medieval bestiaries.  Well-known stories of the phoenix rising from ashes and the pelican feeding her young with her own blood are found in the Physiologus.

Landing on a island that is actually a large sea-creature became part of medieval European folklore and bestiaries. Stewart (2018). The ninth-century Voyage of Saint Brendan {Navigatio sancti Brendani}, chapters 21 and 27, tells of monks singing, kindling fires, voyaging on the backs of whales.

[5] Buzurg Ibn Šahriyār, trans. Freeman-Grenville (1981) p. 22.  This sea-captain’s account included additional naturalistic description of whales, such as:  “When the male couples with the female, it often takes place on the surface of the water.”  Whales in medieval thought came to be associated with lust.  See Wentersdorf (1983-84) pp. 364-5.

[6]  The story of building a fire on a whale-turtle island appears in the first voyage of Sindbad the Sailor.  In that voyage, it plays a pivotal role in a reversal of fortune, but it is not otherwise moralized.  Sindbad’s voyages seem to be mainly adventure-entertainment, with a general moral framework of reversal of fortune.  Sindbad’s voyages are set in Harun al-Rashid’s reign of the Abbasid caliphate (786-809).  The earliest surviving manuscript of Sindbad’s voyages is a Turkish manuscript from the seventeenth century.  The name Sindbad the Sailor points to the Indus River in present-day Pakistan.  While the date and origins of the narrative of Sindbad’s voyages are highly uncertain, Sindbad’s story of the whale-turtle island plausibly comes from the Physiologus.  Like Buzurg Ibn Šahriyār’s version, Sindbad’s version shows the story shedding moral interpretation in serving for folk entertainment.

[images] (1) Bird sitting on an ocean pier. Photo by Douglas Galbi. (2) Building a fire on a whale-island. Illumination in a bestiary. Painted about 1230-40 in England. From folio 69r of British Library, Harley Ms. 4751.

References:

Cook, Albert S. and James Hall Pitman. 1921. Cynewulf. The Old English Physiologus. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Curley, Michael J. 1979. Physiologus. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Freeman-Grenville, Greville Stewart Parker, trans. 1981. Buzurg Ibn Šahriyār.  The book of the wonders of India: mainland, sea and islands. London: East-West Publications.

Grunebaum, Gustave E. von. 1953. Medieval Islam: a study in cultural orientation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hansen, William F. 2002. Ariadne’s thread: a guide to international tales found in classical literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Stewart, Hannah, 2018. “The Devil in the Deep Blue Sea.” the iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty. Published online (May 12) in Art & Archives: Book of Beasts.

Wentersdorf, Karl P. 1983-84. “Animal Symbolism in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: The Imagery of Sex Nausea.” Comparative Drama, vol. 17, no. 4 (Winter), pp. 348-382.