Antiquity
Same-sex love among women in classical and Hellenistic Greece, in Rome, and elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world. Except for Sappho’s (ca. 600 B.C.E.) poetry, there is no direct testimony by a woman of how women in antiquity experienced love between women or of how they viewed its role in their lives. Thus, the available evidence, based on a belief that male sexuality is “naturally”’ active and female sexuality “naturally” passive and on a hierarchical distinction between active and passive sexual roles, expresses male views about women and about female sexuality. The Greek and Latin terminology used to designate female homosexuals does not include “lesbian,” which, in the ancient world, refers to fellatio.
In the Symposium, Plato (427?–347? B.C.E.) calls women sexually drawn to other women hetairistriai, meaning female companions of women. The more frequently used Greek term is tribas; it and its Latin equivalent, fricatrix, both probably derive from verbs meaning “to rub.” Latin authors often used the Greek word tribas, instead of fricatrix, as a way of suggesting that female homosexuality is essentially a foreign phenomenon.
The Latin word, virago, meaning a masculine woman, focuses on the way in which lesbianism represents gender-role transgression. The tendency of much scholarship on homosexuality in antiquity either to omit female experience or to not clearly differentiate it from male experience has encouraged an assumption of a greater acceptance of lesbianism than the evidence allows.
Because the ancient world viewed lesbian women through a male lens, which identified sexuality with penile penetration, most references to female homosexuality assume that one partner (endowed with an unusually enlarged clitoris or making use of a dildo) plays the active “masculine” role. Female homoeroticism is represented as occurring between two adult women, rather than as conforming to the male model of paiderasteia (love of an older male, usually in his twenties, for an adolescent youth), the socially validated form of male homoeroticism. The cultural acceptance of paiderasteia was not extended to include female-female love, which, especially in the Hellenistic period, was almost uniformly castigated as “unnatural” and shameful. The negative judgment applies to both participants in a lesbian relationship, since the presumably “feminine” receptive partner, in not allowing herself to be penetrated by a man, is also acting “unnaturally.”
The understanding of female homoeroticism in antiquity derives from a variety of sources: mythology, visual art (particularly vase paintings), erotic poetry, philosophical texts, comedy, dream books, elite Hellenistic literature, astrological texts, medical texts, and love spells. Responsible interpretation of this material requires careful distinguishing by region and period.
Ancient Greece
Except for Homeric references to the Amazons, there are no allusions to female-female love in early archaic Greek literature (750–600 B.C.E.). The early sixth century offers not only Sappho’s poetry and its evocation of a fully reciprocal, unabashedly sensual love between women, but also the poetry of her near contemporary, the Spartan poet Alcman (mid-seventh century B.C.E.), who composed choral lyrics written for performance by parthenai (unmarried girls). Alcman’s parthenai express the girls’ longings for intimate relations with one another and contain hints that some were involved in affairs with older married women. Indeed, there is evidence that, in ancient Sparta, where unmarried girls were given public education and trained as athletes as nowhere else, female-female relationships were given public endorsement. According to Plutarch (ca. A.D. 46–ca. 127), in Sparta respectable adult women had love affairs with unmarried girls in relationships accorded the same educational function as those attributed to male paiderasteia.
Some scholars believe that, elsewhere in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., the Greeks accepted the involvement of young girls in homoerotic relations during a period of segregation in all-female communities called thiasoi, as in Sappho’s “school” or Artemis’s temple at Brauron. This may have included relations between teachers or priestesses and students (as in the male pattern), but also (unlike that pattern) between the girls themselves. One of Alcman’s lyrics has been interpreted as describing an exclusive bonding between two such girls, validated not for its initiatory value but simply as an expression of mutual attachment.
Whereas two out of the three earliest Greek lyric poets (Sappho’s contemporary Alcaeus is the third) wrote poems referring to female homosexuality, in the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.)—when the thiasoi had disappeared, and women were confined to the domestic sphere—it seems to have become a taboo subject, at least in Athens. Therefore, it is not known if wives of citizens turned to one another for the intimacy and passion they were unlikely to find in heterosexual marriages with men whose own eroticism seems mostly to have been directed into paiderastic relationships. Accounts of female-female lovemaking between heterai (courtesans) probably refer to scenes designed to titillate male customers, but these women may also have engaged in freely chosen sexual relationships with one another.
Vases dating from the late sixth and early fifth centuries B.C.E. in Corinth or Boetia depict erotic encounters between adult women, not between women and girls. One shows a kneeling woman fingering the genitals of another; some show women with dildoes, including a two-ended dildo. Visual art, particularly vase painting, tends to be more explicit in its rendition of female-female eroticism than literary texts.
There are few literary references. A Pindar (518–438 B.C.E.) fragment from the first half of the fifth century speaks of the erotic response one woman has to the beauty of another. The fifth-century philosopher Parmenides wrote that active—that is, masculine—women and passive (feminine) men result from the male and female seeds at conception not melding properly. The conditions are thus congenital, not curable, and lifelong. In the fourth century B.C.E., Plato’s Symposium describes lesbian love originating (just as heterosexual and male homosexual love do) from the splitting of the original round people. After Plato, there is a long silence that extends until the beginning of the Augustan age (late first century B.C.E. into the first decade A.D.). One possible exception is the third-century B.C.E. Italian woman poet Nossis of Locri, who wrote erotic poems that may have referred to lesbian relationships.
Almost all extant Roman-period sources (except for Plutarch’s nonjudgmental description of female-female love in archaic Sparta—and he was not talking about his own world) condemn lesbian relations, even though many condone particular forms of male homoeroticism. Women engaged in same-sex erotic relationships are viewed as trying to play male roles and claim male privilege and, thus, judged as acting against “nature”—that is, against the cultural norms. The first critical references to Sappho’s homoeroticism appear at this time.
Rome
Nothing is known of the language of affection used by Roman women nor whether same-sex eroticism occurred among unmarried girls. Much of the evidence concerning Roman women applies only to the wives of citizens who were not secluded in their homes as women in classical Greece were, although they and their sexuality were still seen as needing to be controlled by men. A married woman’s sexual involvement with another woman was defined as adultery. For an elite woman to engage in lesbian sex was unpardonable, though slaves or prostitutes may have been encouraged to do so to titillate male voyeurs.
Roman-period (ca. 200 B.C.E.–A.D. 200) literature testifies to a general familiarity with the concept of female homoeroticism. The earliest extant Latin reference to female homosexuality appears in a second-century B.C.E. comedy by Plautus (ca. 254–184 B.C.E.), in which a female slave is represented as forcing sexual intercourse upon her mistress. Toward the beginning of the first century B.C.E.,
Seneca (55 B.C.E.–A.D. 40?) presents a fictitious legal case centering on a man who finds his wife in bed with another woman and kills them both, after first looking to see if the partner was a man with a penis of his own or a woman with an artificial one.
In the first century A.D., the poet Phaedrus composed a fable about the origin of the active participants in lesbian sex and the passive partners in male homosexuality; his tale describes Prometheus, returning to the creation of humans after having too much to drink, accidentally putting female sexual organs on some male bodies and male genitals on some female bodies. During the same period,
Petronius’s Satyricon portrays two married women at a banquet getting drunk and beginning to fondle each other; that one is an ex-prostitute and that neither is really respectable is made inescapably clear. Martial (ca. A.D. 40–ca. 104) writes of a matron viewed as utterly respectable because she is reported to have never taken on any lovers, until it is discovered that, in imitation of men, she has a female beloved.
The second-century A.D. Syrian Iamblichos wrote a popular novel about a marriage between an Egyptian princess and a female subject. Lucian’s (ca. A.D. 115?–ca. 180) Dialogues of the Courtesans describes a marriage between two courtesans, one of whom, claiming to have been born just like other women but with the mind and desires of a man, takes on a man’s name and dress. She boasts that she can give pleasure as well as any man—and doesn’t need a penis to do so.
Astrological texts, an important source for nonelite Roman-period attitudes toward lesbianism, present female homoeroticism as the result of being born under a particular configuration (usually one in which Venus appears in what was regarded as a masculine house) and, thus, as a lifelong orientation. These texts often lump together homoerotic, adulterous, and promiscuous women because all take on an active sexual role, or lump lesbians with passive males because both refuse to conform to sanctioned gender roles. Though caused by the stars, lesbianism is viewed negatively; yet astrologers seem to aim at helping women accept their fate rather than change it.
Artemidoros’s Oneirokritika (second century A.D.), the most influential Hellenistic book about the classification of dreams, assumes a dominating, penetrating model for female-female homoeroticism. If a woman dreams that she possesses another woman, it means she will share her secrets with that woman; if she dreams she is possessed by another woman, she will be divorced or widowed; if she dreams of making love with a female stranger, she will attempt futile projects.
Medical texts from the Roman period that deal with lesbians also take for granted the dominant phallic assumptions. Viewing healthy female sexuality as passive, they recommend either mind control or surgery to correct the pathology of the presumed active partner: surgery to remove an overlarge clitoris or psychological treatment to deal with the lack of ethical restraint on lust
Hellenistic Egypt
In Hellenistic Egypt (ca. 300 B.C.E.–A.D. 300), women commissioned love spells, which invoke the aid of underworld spirits to attract other women. Extant examples of such spells (probably composed by men) provide the names of the women who purchased them and of the women whose love they sought to compel. The formulaic language of these spells assumes a male model of domination and conquest and leaves unclear whether the aim is a long-term public relation or a clandestine affair.
Several different sources—some of these spells, several of the novels cited above, the writings of the Alexandrian astrologer Ptolemy (fl. A.D. 121–151)—suggest that, at least in Egypt and Syria, long-term relations between women were sometimes understood in relation to the model of heterosexual marriage. Since, in the Roman-ruled world, official matrimony was available only to citizens and marriage otherwise meant only cohabitation (perhaps sanctified in a private ceremony), two women living together might well have considered themselves married. Although the early Christian father Clement of Alexandria (ca. A.D. 150–ca. 214) speaks of women who marry other women (using both the active and the passive form of the verb “to marry”) as an unspeakable practice, he nonetheless describes their relation in terms of a socially accepted institution.
Jewish and Early Christian Texts
Post exilic (ca. 100 B.C.E.–A.D. 70) biblical texts prohibit male anal intercourse (though Roman period rabbis permitted anal intercourse in marriage) but make no reference to female homosexuality.
Hellenistic-period Jewish texts represent sexual love between women as not just a practice of foreigners, but as something that also occurs within Judaism. Talmudic rabbis disagree as to whether lesbianism is to be construed as harlotry. The school of Hillel is said to allow women who rub with each other to marry priests, while the school of Shammai does not. These discussions of lesbian sexuality make no distinction between active and receptive partners and assume that the women involved would also marry men.
Early Christian literature views homoeroticism somewhat differently from other Roman-period sources. Like his gentile contemporaries, Paul (d. A.D. 67) sees women’s love of women as “unnatural” because it challenges gender boundaries, but, unlike those contemporaries, he groups female homosexuals and male homosexuals in the same category and condemns not only the receptive, but also the active, partner in male-male love. Early Christian apocalyptic writings put male and female homosexuals in the same pit in hell.
Written by Christine Downing in "Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia", Bonnie Zimmerman Editor, Garland Publishing Inc. A Member of the Taylor & Francis Group, New York, 2000, excerpts pp.45-49. Digitized, adapted and ilustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.