Abstract
In this chapter, I describe the intersection between one particular form of male-male desire and the philosophical-dialogue genre. It occurs in the line of influence extending from Plato’s early work Lysis through the philosophical dialogues of Cicero—primarily On Friendship (Laelius de amicitia) and the Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae disputationes)—to certain medieval dialogues: the Spiritual Friendship (De spiritali amicitia) of Aelred of Rievaulx and the epitomes of Aelred’s work by his adaptors, Thomas of Frakaham and Peter of Blois. This line of influence is clearcut: Cicero’s debt to the Lysis (by way of Aristotle, Xenophon, and Theophrastus) in his own writings on friendship (and on other relations between men) is widely acknowledged,1 and Aelred in turn discusses his own debt to Cicero directly (while Thomas and Peter essentially rewrite Aelred). These works continued to be read and to exert an influence long after the Middle Ages, but the specific tradition I am concerned with here—that which can be traced to Plato, and in which the dialogue form is used to discuss friendships between men—is most potent in this direct line from Greece to Rome to the European Middle Ages.
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Notes
David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 53; this entire chapter, pp. 53–92, is helpful in this context, and see also Aspects of Friendship in the Greco-Roman World, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 43 (Portsmouth, RI, 2001)
Lynette G. Mitchell, “Friends and Enemies in Athenian Politics,” Greece and Rome, second series 43 (1996): 11–30.
Alfons Fürst, “Freundschaft als Tugend: Über den Verlust der Wirklichkeit im antiken Freundschaftsbegriff,” Gymnasium 104 (1997): 413–433 traces what he sees as a decline in the classical understanding of friendship (judged from a modern point of view).
Plato’s dialogues cannot be dated precisely; the early manuscripts of his works arrange them thematically in groups of four, not chronologically. Most scholars believe that those dialogues, like the Lysis, that remain close to the historical Socrates’ methods, must for that reason be dated to the early stage of Plato’s career, while the development of Plato’s own philosophical doctrines, first using Socrates as his spokesman and then diminishing or eliminating Socrates’ role, occurs later. For the complexities of this relationship, see Daniel W Graham, “Socrates and Plato,” Phronesis 37 (1992): 141–165
Charles H. Kahn, “Did Plato Write Socratic Dialogs?,” Classical Quarterly 31 (1981): 305–320.
On chronology, see Holger Thesleff, “Platonic Chronology,” Phronesis 34 (1989): 1–26.
See David Bolotin, Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship: An Interpretation of the Lysis, with a New Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 53, n. 1.
But cf. Christopher Planeaux, “Socrates, an Unreliable Narrator? The Dramatic Setting of he Lysis,” Classical Philology 96 (2001): 5–13, which claims that “Socrates maneuvered himself for the express purpose of encountering Hippothales’ new love interest,” p. 64.
Catherine Pickstock, “The Problem of Reported Speech: Friendship and Philosophy in Plato’s Lysis and Symposium,” Telos 123 (Spring 2002): 35–65, suggests that, despite the apparent philosophical aporia, the undefinable concept of friendship is concretely depicted in the friendly relations of the frame story.
See K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 16, for his use of this terminology. Dover’s has been the most influential treatment of this topic, and many later scholars have adopted his usage; Greek writers use other terms as well as these.
A. W. Nightingale, “Plato and Praise: Plato’s Critique of Encomiastic Discourse in the Lysis and Symposium” Classical Quarterly 43.i (1993): 112–130; see especially pp. 114–116.
Compare Halperin, “Appendix,” on this point. On desire and “one’s own,” see David K. Glidden, “The Lysis on Loving One’s Own,” Classical Quarterly 21 (1981): 39–59.
For a clarification of the philosophical issues, see Naomi Reshotko, “The Good, the Bad, and the Neither Good nor Bad in Plato’s Lysis,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 38.3 (2000): 251–262.
See also Samuel Scolnicov, “Friends and Friendship in Plato: Some Remarks on the Lysis” Scripta Classica Israelica 12 (1993): 67–74.
In his Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 1–20. The essay was originally published in 1972. See also Maria Joó, “The Concept of Philia in Plato’s Dialogue Lysis,” Acta antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 40 (2000): 195–204.
Gadamer, “Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis,” p. 9. Other critics who find that the Lysis does resolve its apparent aporia in one way or another include Pickstock; Reshotko; Joó; and James Haden, “Friendship in Plato’s Lysis,” Review of Metaphysics 37 (1983): 327–356; Beatriz Bossi, “Is the Lysis Really Aporetic?,” in Plato: Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides: Proceedings of the V Symposium Platonicum, ed. Thomas M. Robinson and Luc Brisson (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2000): 172–179;
Don Adams, “A Socratic Theory of Friendship,” International Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1995): 269–282.
See Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in his Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 196–231.
Martin Buber, I and Thou, 2nd ed., trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), p. 178.
See Pierre Grimal, “Caractères généraux du dialogue romain, de Lucilius à Cicéron,” L’information littéraire 7 (1955): 192–198
M. Levine, “Cicero and the Literary Dialogue,” The Classical Journal 53 (1958): 146–151
Michel Ruch, Le préambule dans les oeuvres philosophiques de Cicéron: essai sur la genèse et l’art du dialogue (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1958).
Cicero’s view finds recent support from Percy, Pederasty and Pedagogy, who also links the origins of institutionalized pederasty in Greece with exercising naked (e.g., pp. 114–116). Cf. Myles McDonnell, “The Introduction of Athletic Nudity: Thucydides, Plato, and the Vases,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 111 (1991): 182–193.
Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 63. Williams cites Cornelius Nepos as another author who declares that such “Greek” practices are considered dishonorable among Romans, ibid. Williams’ book as a whole provides an essential corrective to this view.
John R Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C.–A.D. 250 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 78. Clarke’s more recent, popular book Roman Sex: 100 B.C.–A.D. 250 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003) adds the qualification that “[t]he Roman elite man must not have sex with another freeborn male—boy or adult,” pp. 88–90—a qualification that begs the question of power relations. The Roman–Greek difference in this area may have been less striking in reality than in its artistic representations.
Marilyn B. Skinner, “Introduction: Quod multo fit aliter in Graecia,” in Roman Sexualities, ed. Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 3–25, at p. 11. On stuprum,
see also Elaine Fantham, “Stuprum: Public Attitudes and Penalties for Sexual Offenses in Republican Rome,” Échos du monde classique 35 (1991): 267–291;
Amy Richlin, “Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love Between Men,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3.4 (1993): 523–573; Williams, Roman Homosexuality, pp. 96–124.
On the “cult of virility,” see Paul Veyne, “L’Homosexualité à Rome,” Communications 35 (1982): 26–33
Eva Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World trans. C. Ó. Cuilleanáin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 218.
More recently, see Emma Dench, “Austerity, Excess, Success, and Failure in Hellenistic and Early Imperial Italy,” in Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Bodies of Antiquity, ed. Emma Wyke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 121–146; Erik Gunderson, “Discovering the Body in Roman Oratory,” in Parchments of Gender, pp. 169–189; and Williams, Roman Homosexuality, pp. 125–224. For a typology of Roman attitudes, see Holt N. Parker, “The Teratogenic Grid,” in Roman Sexualities, pp. 47–65. The syntheses in Greenberg, Construction of Homosexuality, pp. 152–163, and Fone, Homophobia, pp. 44–59, are also helpful. Documentary evidence is collected in Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, ed. Hubbard, pp. 308–532.
Alan E. Douglas, “Form and Content in the Tusculan Disputations,” in Cicero the Philosopher: Twelve Papers, ed. J. G. F Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 197–218, provides a more positive assessment of the Tusculans’ nondialogical form.
Eleanor Winsor Leach, “Absence and Desire in Cicero’s De amicitia,” Classical World 87.2 (1993–1994): 3–20 does find an erotic undertone in the desire for what is absent, as well as in Cicero’s political desires.
Konstan, Friendship, p. 131. See also Thomas N. Habinek, “Towards a History of Friendly Advice: The Politics of Candor in Cicero’s de Amicitia,” Apeiron 23 (1990): 165–185.
On the relationship of one’s personal and political status in the early imperial period, see Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (1986; New York: Vintage, 1988), pp. 81–104. Earlier, according to Foucault—and relevant to our consideration of Cicero—“[s]elf-mastery had implied a close connection between the superiority one exercised over oneself, the authority one exercised in the context of the household, and the power one exercised in the field of an agonistic society,” p. 94.
See also Benjamin Fiore, S. J., “The Theory and Practice of Friendship in Cicero,” in Greco-Roman Perspectives on Friendship, ed. John T Fitzgerald (Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1997), pp. 59–76
Sandra Citroni Marchetti, Amicizia e potere nelle lettere di Cicerone e nelle Elegie Ovidiane dell’Esilio (Florence: Università degli Studi, 2000) provides a more recent and specific analysis of the relationship between friendship and power in the changing political climate, as expressed in Cicero’s letters. On hierarchies of friendship in Cicero’s period,
see Richard Saller, “Patronage and Friendship in early Imperial Rome: Drawing the Distinction,” in Patronage in Ancient Society, ed. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49–62
Mario Attilio Levi, “Da clientela ad amicitia” Epigrafia e territorio 3 (1994): 375–381 John Nichols, “Hospitium and Political Friendship in the Late Republic,” in Aspects of Friendship, pp. 99–108.
But compare Carl P. E. Springer, “Fannius and Scaevola in Cicero’s De amicitia,” Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 7 (1994): 267–278 for a suggestion that the friction between these two interlocutors, and therefore their personalities as well, are better developed than is usually supposed.
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 222.
See also Kenneth C. Russell, “Aelred: The Gay Abbot of Rievaulx,” Studia Mystica 5 (1982): 51–64.
The standard study of Aelred, Aelred Squire’s Aelred of Rievaulx: A Study (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1969), has little to offer on the subject of Aelred’s sexuality. More useful for my purposes is Brian Patrick McGuire, Brother and Lover: Aelred of Rievaulx (New York: Crossroad, 1994), which offers a sensible assessment of Aelred’s erotic desires and behaviors, concluding both that Aelred, while a courtier at the court of King David of Scotland, probably had at least one passionate (and in Aelred’s view, sinful) erotic attachment to another man, pp. 48–50, and that throughout his life his primary emotional attachments were with other men, pp. 105–118, 142, though in the monastery “he could transfer his sexual energies in this area to a calmer desire for companionship,” p. 113. For a full consideration of the evidence, see McGuire’s essay “Sexual Awareness and Identity in Aelred of Rievaulx,” American Benedictine Review 45 (1994): 184–226.
Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), especially pp. 29–91;
Elizabeth Keiser, Courtly Desire and Medieval Homophobia: The Legitimation of Sexual Pleasure in Cleanness and its Contexts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), especially pp. 71–92. The attempts at regulating same-sex erotics described in these texts may be best understood in the context of the larger medieval attempt to regulate all forms of sexuality:
see Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).
On the construction and regulation of male–male desire in the Middle Ages, see also the relevant sections of James Brundage’s exhaustive study Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA [?]: Dorset, 1979)
Allen J. Frantzen, Before the Closet: From Beowulf to Angels in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and the essays collected in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); the syntheses of Greenberg, Construction of Homosexuality, pp. 242–298, and Fone, Homophobia, pp. 111–175, are also helpful.
See Jordan, Invention, pp. 92–113; Keiser, Courtly, p. 236, nn. 19–20. See also the discussion of this topic in Robert S. Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 47–59.
On Aelred as a Christian adaptor of Cicero, see Amédée Hallier, “God Is Friendship: The Key to Aelred of Rievaulx’s Christian Humanism,” American Benedictine Review 18 (1967): 393–420
Letterio Mauro, “L’Amicitia come com-pimento di umanià nel De spiritali amicitia di Aelredo di Rievaulx,” Rivista di filosofa neo-scolastica 66 (1974): 89–103
Charles Dumont, “L’Amitié spirituelle d’Aelred de Rievaulx,” Revue générale 134.10 (October, 1999): 67–73.
Yannick Carré, Le Baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Age: Rites, symboles, mentalités, à travers les textes et les images, XI e –XV e siècles (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1992), finds that the late medieval kiss typically unites the carnal with the spiritual (“réalise l’union du charnel et du spirituel”), p. 325. Carré briefly discusses the kiss in Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship, but places his emphasis on the metaphorical nature of Aelred’s spiritual kiss, p. 130, n. 6.
This is only a claim about general tendencies, and is not intended to deny agency or authority in certain cases to those who were gendered feminine. See Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 167–227. For a nuanced view of these issues in Aelred’s period
see the essays collected in David Townsend and Andrew Taylor, eds., The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), especially the editors’ introduction, pp. 1–13, as well as the works of Carolyn Walker Bynum, especially, in this regard, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Bynum specifically discusses Aelred’s appropriation of the image of Jesus as mother, pp. 122–124, and points out that Aelred’s medieval biographer/hagiographer, Walter Daniel, records Aelred’s understanding of himself as a mother to his monks, p. 124. See also McGuire, Brother, on this point, pp. 96, 123,
and cf. Marsha Dutton, “Christ Our Mother: Aelred’s Iconography for Contemplative Union,” in Goad and Nail, ed. E. Rozanne Elder, Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 10 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985), 21–45.
McGuire, Brother, p. 136. For a discussion of Aelred’s followers Thomas of Frakaham and Peter of Blois, see McGuire’s Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1988), pp. 341–352. For parallel Latin texts of these and other epitomes, see Abbreviationes de Spiritali Amicitia, in Hoste and Talbot’s edition of Aelred’s works, I: 352–634. Even the brief epitome entitled Dialogus inter Aelredum et discipulum (pp. 497–623) reduces Aelred’s several contentious interlocutors to a single, anonymous, uncharacterized disciple, and the dialogue itself to a Ciceronian exchange dominated by the single voice of “Aelred.”
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© 2005 Robert S. Sturges
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Sturges, R.S. (2005). Erotics of Friendship: From Plato’s Lysis to Aelred of Rievaulx. In: Dialogue and Deviance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978516_2
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