Draft of the Opening to my Book

Just below is a draft of the opening paragraphs of my book on late-Roman manhood. There may be some typos--- and no footnotes or italics--- but it will give you a *small* idea of what I am up to....

DRAFT COMMENCES:

When it is a discovered that I lecture at university, people want to know what I work on. And how the eyes do glaze over when I mention the later Roman Empire (the fourth century in particular, but my interests range somewhat wider than that). For most persons, scholarly and non-scholarly alike, the later centuries of the Roman Empire seem so distant and they lack the periodic Hollywood blockbusters that make Ancient Greece and Rome of the late Republic and earlier Empire more familiar. And upon closer inspection, these centuries also seem to lack the excitement of, say, Renaissance Florence or Oscar Wilde, if sodomy is your thing, or of the terrifying fascistic/totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century if manhood is of specific interest. But for those who are of a truly scholarly bent, non-scholarly and scholarly alike, interest does perk up when I point out particular ways in which the later Roman Empire can been seen to impinge on our lives right now.

Is it trite even to mention the triumph of Christianity in late antiquity? No matter if it is, it is nonetheless the case that the marriage of ecclesiastical and temporal authority contracted in these centuries generated results that still affect us in the western world especially in the notion that any political settlement will have to take account of Christianity. This marriage attached the Old and New Testaments to all the western polities as ahistorical icons that still, in the belief of many, provide both unassailable moral guidance and perfect maps for past and future. This is reality with which we in The West, from one end to the other, deal regularly and profoundly.

But these final centuries for the empire matter not only because they were demonstrably formative of broad expectations for how we should live together now. They still exert an overt influence. In 1986, Chief Justice Burger of the Supreme Court had occasion to cite Codex Theodosianus 9.7.6, a Roman law from 390 CE, in his concurrence with the majority opinion in the case Bowers v. Hardwick (a case in which the court ruled that so-called sodomy statutes were permissible and a decision that was not overturned until 2003 with the Lawrence decision):

"I join the Court's opinion, but I write separately to underscore my view that in constitutional terms there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy. As the Court notes [above]…the proscriptions against sodomy have very “ancient roots.” Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judaeo-Christian moral and ethical standards. Homosexual sodomy was a capital crime under Roman law. See Code Theod. 9.7.6; Code Just. 9.9.31… [various later laws from English and American Jurisprudence follow]…To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching. This is essentially not a question of personal “preferences” but rather of the legislative authority of the State. I find nothing in the Constitution depriving a State of the power to enact the statute challenged here."

Justice Burger grounds his decision here (on whether or not an American state in the United States in the twentieth century should have the ability to outlaw consensual homosexual sexual behavior between adults and punish offenders with at least one and as many as twenty years in prison ) in legal precedent stretching back to the ancient world. After unspecific reference to “Judaeo-Christian moral and ethical standards,” a law from the fourth century CE leads a list of named statutes that criminalized homosexual sodomy. The long view from history casts this law from Georgia in a light that renders it more civilized to be sure (a stint in prison, last one to twenty years, is surely to be preferred to execution, as we shall shortly see), but it is an ancestry that should have been seen as an embarrassment, especially when the mode of execution is revealed. In CTh 9.7.6 the penalty for a man who has been penetrated anally is public burning:

"All those who practice sexual debauchery by condemning their manly body (virile corpus) that they refashioned in a womanly way through the other sex’s yielding—for they seem to maintain no distinction from women—they, as the people demand, will pay for such a high crime with avenging flames." (Codex Theodosianus 9.7.6)

Here we have a manly body (virile corpus) being defiled by this activity. And in a fuller version the law perserved in the Mosaicarum et Romanarum Legum Collatio (5.3.1-2; henceforth the Collatio ), we discover that this activity was also an insult to a man’s soul. In this other version immediately after mentioning the bodily defilement and burning it is specified that this penalty is exacted so that “all may understand that the abode of the manly soul (virilis anima) must be sacrosanct (sacrosanctum) to all and that not without the highest penalty will he who disgustingly has lost his own [sex] attain to a sex not his own.” I will have occasion later in this book to discuss this law in both its versions in some detail, but suffice it to say for the moment that according to this law the man who would be penetrated by another man has committed an outrage against the “manly body” and against the “manly soul” and this sexual transgression against what a man is supposed to be in his body and in his mind is grounds for the barbaric penalty of public burning. While this law was contemporaneously compared to the strictures in Mosaic law, specifically to Leviticus 20:13 in the Collatio at 5.1.1, neither versions of the law, the shorter in the Codex and the longer in the Collatio, grounds its authority in either the Old or New Testaments and instead sees this particular behavior as an insult to manhood.

DRAFT BREAKS OFF.